The Crazed Beauty That Is New York City

Today could have been a lazy Sunday, but my life often refuses to let me be lazy. Without giving much thought other than I wanted a way to guarantee I would be awake and would do things today beyond sit on my couch, I agreed to meet people at 9 a.m. this morning in Chelsea to help renovate the location of a future Krav Maga school. It’s tough enough for me to get to work by 9 a.m. on a weekday, but I was determined to get there on time and I actually got there a few minutes early.

From 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. I helped with renovations. I bundled cardboard, painted window frames with primer, hauled pipes and even a few radiators and finished scraping paint from some stubborn metal.

That ended, I walked from 25^th St. to 42^nd St. to see if Inglorious Basterds was playing at a reasonable time. On my way, a man outside the New York Times building handed me a pamphlet that informed me the world would end on Oct. 21, 2011. That’s good information to have, I think. I know it’s popular now to believe that the world is going to end sometime in 2012, but those predictions are based on the Mayan calendar. The pamphlet I received was based on the Christian calendar, and also predicted that the rapture would happen May 21, 2011. So if true, we’ll have five months without Christian fundamentalists before the world ends. That’s good news.

I sat at a table in a pedestrian mall area of Times Square to eat a snack while I waited for the movie to start. A guy was interviewing people with a video camera to make a funny video for his brother’s wedding. Two attractive young women were approaching people to interview for a local TV news show also.

While I was heading to the theater, I first passed by photographers snapping photos of a married couple in Times Square. Professional photographers were snapping away furiously, but then tourists got into the act as well. I walked around the mess and headed towards 8^th Ave.

Outside a hotel on 8^th Ave., people were rushing to get autographs of what appeared to be professional athletes of some kind, based on the glimpses of the photos they were signing. The athletes were dressed in expensive-looking suits that you could tell they loathed wearing, and they were getting into a large chartered bus. An earnest autograph seeker told me that these were the Anaheim Ducks, who were in town to play the New York Rangers. I don’t know why they needed a chartered bus—you would think professional athletes could handle the nine blocks from 43^rd St. to Madison Square Garden on 34^th Street, but I guess not (indeed their sloth proved revealing, as they fell to the Rangers, 3-0).

Also, I walked through a large street festival that was taking place on 8^th Ave. between 42^nd. St. and 59^th St. These street festivals in New York are pretty much all the same now. There are lots of food stands, t-shirt stands, sunglasses stands, and other stuff that you can get just about anywhere any time already.

Inglorious Basterds is an excellent film. When it was over, I decided to head to Barnes & Noble near Lincoln Center to shop for books. Near Lincoln Center, I came across the closing night of the New York Film Festival. A red carpet and a small throng of fans and photographers and a small but sizable throng of security awaited the arrival of Penelope Cruz, whose new film was to be shown there at the festival.

Just another slow Sunday in New York City.

Another Birthday...

Today is my birthday. I try not to mention it to people, as I don’t like celebrating it, but my family, friends and co-workers were too good to let me forget it.

I don’t have much to say about my birthday, it is not a milestone year by any measure and I have no profound observations of the day.

One thing I have noticed is that my glum moods in years past were not justified. Every year on my birthday, starting at age 23, I would get very glum and feel old and unaccomplished.

I’m still relatively unaccomplished, but I realize now that I spent too much time sulking and not living when I was younger. Ages that seemed old to me then seem young to me now.

When I turned 30, things seemed to get better. A friend of mine who is in his 50s, told me that turning 30 would be OK. He said he had more fun in his 30s than he did in his 20s. So far I have too.

The secret to live is to keep living it. Indulge every adventurous whim and creative urge you have, and you will not be sorry. That’s the choicest piece of wisdom I have accumulated these past 37 years.

Freedom is a Clove Cigarette

This week, the government overstepped its bounds yet again in the private lives of its citizens here in what we still like to think as the land of the free.

A federal ban on flavored cigarettes went into effect. This did not affect all flavored cigarettes, but only a marginal few, including clove cigarettes.

The rationale behind this ban is that flavored cigarettes are more appealing to children. Society was not always this paranoid about protecting children. I remember being able to buy cigarettes as a teenager growing up in the suburbs. Only a real asshole of a cashier would card someone for cigarettes. Now it’s commonplace to deny smokes to teenagers. The police conduct sting operations on convenience stores using real teenagers as live bait.

For all its good intentions, the effort against smoking has gone way too far. Now even adults who want to cannot buy flavored cigarettes. Interestingly, the ban does not cover the more popular brands nor does it outlaw miniature cigars (cigarillos), which are part of the larger tobacco companies’ domain.

I’m all for discouraging smoking. I’m very glad I never got into that habit. As a non-smoker, I enjoy the relatively smoke-free environment that is possible thanks to the indoor smoking ban in New York City. But being a beneficiary, I still see that it is wrong.

Businesses, like homes, should be able to determine for themselves if they want to be smoke free or not—though some businesses where smoking would be dangerous or harmful to others, such as gas stations, hospitals, etc. should have such a ban for safety reasons and already outlaw smoking on their own anyway. Some bars and restaurants would be smoking-friendly; others would be smoke-free. The choice would be yours. That, albeit in a small way, is what this country is supposed to be about.

We should have the freedom to buy clove cigarettes. They smell much better than regular cigarettes anyway.

“It’s a free country,” used to be a common phrase in the U.S.A. You don’t hear it much anymore.

Still a Happy Camper

This past weekend, I went camping with some friends in Vermont. It had been many years since I was camping, and I was determined to make a go of it and enjoy roughing it in the great outdoors.

I woke up early on a Friday and took Metro North to New Haven, where my friend Luke met me. We began our drive to Vermont and made good time despite a little bit of traffic congestion.

Our first destination was Curtis’ Barbeque in Putney, Vermont. Curtis’ is an outdoor place where the kitchen is two old blue school busses and Curtis himself grills under a corrugated steel awning outdoors in the company of the restaurant’s pet pig. They serve some of the best ribs I’ve ever eaten, and their chicken and baked potatoes are excellent as well. It is a delicious meal and if you’re anywhere near Putney Vermont, go there.

Luke and I were the first of our group to arrive at Fort Dummer State Park in Vermont. We celebrated our arrival with some beers, which became beers of consolation as we were soon scrambling to set up our tents in monsoon-like rains.

Despite being drenched by the rain twice, our group of campers had a good time. The rain eventually died down both Friday and Saturday and we got fires going and cooked delicious food and drank delicious beer.

Saturday, I accompanied Luke’s wife Sarah and her friend Michelle to the nearby town of Brattleboro, Vt. It was very satisfying to shop for dry clothes at Sam’s Outdoor Outfitters, which not only had free popcorn but awesome socks and hunting and camping equipment.

Brattleboro is full of used book stores. We visited Brattleboro Books, where the owner told us about her job as a truck driver who transported expensive art. The job went well until hijackers shot at her truck while she was transporting a $50 million painting.

Saturday night brought even more rain, and some of the group went to a restaurant in town, but four of us: Luke, Debbie, Mike and I stayed in the rain and Luke’s fire-tending acumen kept the campfire going despite another monsoon. We huddled in our rain ponchos and once the rain died down we feasted on burgers and chirizos.

Later, a bunch of us visited a possibly haunted slate quarry.

The next day we visited the quarry again and Luke, Sarah, Martha and I stopped by Curtis’ again and I filled up on ribs and a baked potato.

I’m already signed on for the next camping trip in late September. Hopefully I’ll stay dry, but either way it will be fun.

The Vantastic Blue Betty, Part I

My latest Notes from a Polite New Yorker column begins to document my adventure retrieving a van from Long Island.

What would have been a horrible and maddening day became a fun adventure thanks to spending much of the day with Jon P., also known as The Beast, and our mutual friend Joey Bones. The company you keep is very important, never more so than when things go wrong, and I was in the best of company that day.

The story of Blue Betty is not over; it is being written as we speak. She currently sits in my mother’s yard in Westchester. How she got there is a long story.