The Discontent of Our Winter

Just in time for the spring-like weather we’ve been having recently, here my latest ‘Notes from a Polite New Yorker’ column about special hazards of a New York City winter.

If you’ve been in New York for the past two months, you were sick of snow weeks ago, and now that the snow is rapidly melting, a minefield of poop and garbage awaits us on our sidewalks.

I’m heading to Las Vegas tonight to see Penn & Teller, do some gambling, take in the sights and not get married. I will return with a full report of what I see and do there. Wish me luck.

****

New York City has all the things that the rest of the country has, just first and more intense. So it has been with this year's wallop of snow. New York City has gone more than 50 days covered in snow. The 2010-2011 winter is far from over yet is already one of the most infamous in our city's history as far as winter weather.

The New York City area got a big blizzard of snow beginning the night after Christmas. We haven't seen a day without snow on the ground since.

We're not unique in getting a lot of snow, and many parts of the country have had it worse. But city life creates more and more interesting hazards and obstacles than South Dakota or even Boston.

Some of our more specific winter hazards include:

Yellow Snow – urine soaked snow left by animals and humans. While New York has a lot of dogs, I think it would be assumptive to blame dogs for all of the yellow snow in the city. Homeless, drunks, the atrociously lazy and desperate urinators coping with New York's dearth of public restrooms are also to blame.

Dogs are also not the only ones to blame for:

Turdcicles – the frozen (mostly dog) poop left by people too lazy to clean up after their dogs (and homeless people). The snow storms left lots of chances for them to simply kick snow atop the offending waste. With snow levels receding, these treats are left like mines on our sidewalks.

Quickslush - Another winter hazard that is especially plentiful in New York City is what I call "quickslush." Just as quicksand is a watery death that resembles regular sand, quickslush is a puddle of icy water and melting snow that resembles asphalt in appearance because of its rough choppy surface. You think you're stepping onto a shiny spot of street only to go ankle deep into a freezing puddle of slush—quickslush.

Plough Walls – these are the walls of hardened snow kicked up and shoved aside by snow plows. They are a particular menace to people with cars, since they will either have to shovel their car out of a wall of it if they're parked on the street or break through it if they have a driveway. They also make things tougher for pedestrians, as the curbs at crosswalks are often packed with these plow walls.

Snow Patios (aka Redneck Valet Parking) – the assemblage of lawn furniture or other household items used to reserve parking spots. I have not personally seen any shoveled spaces being reserved with lawn furniture. I like to think New Yorkers are above these kinds of childish practices. If you are going to reserve a parking space with a lawn chair in New York, be prepared to sit in that lawn chair until your car arrives or kiss that chair goodbye (though sitting in that chair is no guarantee either). If your car is there already, on the street and waiting to pull into the spot, fine, consider it reserved. But putting lawn furniture in a parking space to reserve it is really only giving the gift of lawn furniture to the lucky commuter who finds the spot when you have to go back inside your apartment to use the bathroom (unless you are responsible for some of the yellow snow problem).

Garbage Everest – an enormous mountain of snow piled very high with the idea that it will soon be removed via dump truck by the Sanitation Department. Doubtless it includes within it all kinds of garbage and other debris pushed into it by plows. The Sanitation Department also takes it upon itself to close down streets without any plan or warning when they want to remove these mountains. And they do this by parking a big truck that should be plowing snow at one end of the street to unofficially close it. This doesn't mean the street is completely blocked and you have no way of knowing if the truck is trying to block the street or is just being driven by an idiot or both.

I'm telling myself to enjoy the cold misery now, because the discontent of our winter always leads to a punishing sun of New York City summer, and that is always more miserable than winter.

Suckered by The Strand

I recently went to The Strand book store to spend a gift certificate I got for Christmas. The Strand is one of New York’s finest book stores, really a rare store filled with all kinds of book at discounted prices. I spent hours there many weekends when I first moved back to New York. I don’t make it there as often now, but I always ask for a Strand gift card for Christmas and often get one.

On my most recent visit I noticed a novel for sale on one of the many tables dedicated to discounted fiction. The novel is “Daughter of Fortune” by Isabel Allende. Reading its back cover, I found it interesting. The novel is about an orphan who goes to California during the Gold Rush of 1849. It promises intrigue, violence, and history of the old American West. The price was right too and I added it to my purchases.

When I got home and began putting away my books, I removed the Strand’s price tag on the Allende novel only to find that the price tag had been strategically placed to cover up an “Oprah’s Book Club” symbol!

I’ve been Oprah-ed by one of my favorite book stores!

Oprah Winfrey is TV’s most successful phony. She’s exploited the tragedies and private grief of myriad citizens while claiming to help them. There is not a sincere bone in her corpulent body. To read a book soiled with her logo is to join the sad herd of stultified hausfraus who hang on her every scripted, insipid word.

The Strand knows that its clientele are more intelligent than to count themselves among Oprah Winfrey’s legions of slack-jawed buffoons. I am confident that they knew the Oprah label would repel more of its customers than it would attract, and so they cunningly placed their price tag to completely conceal this mark of the TV beast.

I will still read Isabel Allende’s novel. But if I am to read this book in public, I must somehow obscure the Oprah label. Perhaps I should create a sticker of my own that will reclaim good books from the cultural slag heap that is Oprah’s book club. “Scumbag Book Club – Polite New Yorker Approved,” may soon grace the covers of our finest books.

Saying Goodbye to an Old Friend

I told people I was taking a year off from drinking. That year is now over but I’m not going back.

Quitting drinking was something in the back of my mind for a long time. I even took extended breaks from drinking for months at a time here and there, though sometimes book-ending these periods with serious benders. I pulled off these periods of not drinking just fine. It was the drinking life that gave me trouble.

I found a book I had read about when it was published called "Drinking, A Love Story," by Caroline Knapp. It’s a very good book despite some of its mushy emotional female content. Knapp points out that if you are someone who thinks and worries about drinking a lot, that’s a sure-fire sign that you should quit. That idea really stuck with me, because so many times I found myself doing my own form of alcohol calculus (if I have only four beers and then maybe have a soda so I’m not too drunk; if I start with a mixed drink and then switch to beer I’ll be OK) that continually left me short-changed. In Knapp’s book she recommends Pete Hamill’s "A Drinking Life," which is a brilliant memoir about growing up in New York. Drinking features prominently in Hamill’s book, but it’s a great New York memoir first, and not really a book about drinking at all. He does detail his decision to quit drinking, though, and mentions that he saw himself as acting out his life instead of living it.

Knapp’s and Hamill’s books were filled with a lot of things I recognized and encouraged me to give up the ghost on the drinking life.

I’d like to say that there was a big clarifying event that forced my hand and made me swear off booze, but the truth is I got tired of it. I got tired of waking up with a big headache, a lot less money and the painful fear that I had done or said something stupid enough to lose friends in the process. I got tired of waking up angry over the crappy state I was in and having no one to be angry at but myself. There were plenty of times when I drank a lot and didn’t overdo it and had a great time and patted myself on the back for that, but those times were being outnumbered by the times when I set out to pace myself and ended up in the zone where you’re on a great drunken roll and you just have to have that next sweet drink, and eventually you’re too drunk and you hate yourself for it.

I would be the worst kind of hypocrite to denounce drinking altogether. I dedicated too many hours to the fine art of consuming alcohol to stab that old friend in the back like that. There have been too many good times spent with the stuff, too many good memories forged with beer and whiskey to look upon them as anything but old friends. But sometimes friends outlive their usefulness.

Drinking is only as good as the help it gives you to do the other things you want to do, to have the real adventures and the real good times. It’s not the drinking that really makes for the good time; it’s the courage to meet women, the fun of joking and speaking very frankly with your friends, to blast through the social awkwardness that might cripple us. If drinking is still a help and a healthy supplement to life itself, then great. But for me it turned from a stepping stone to a stumbling block. I spent too much time worrying about drinking to make it fun anymore.

I have generally kept quiet about quitting drinking, because in my opinion it shouldn’t matter. Being defined by your drinking is a dead end, but so is being defined by your not drinking. It’s true I don’t go to bars much anymore on my own, but I won’t refuse to go to if I’m invited to hang out with friends there. I understand that my friends aren’t trying to force me to drink, they simply want to hang out and bars are the usual way to do that. It would be the most arrogant, self-centered crap to ask all of my friends to rearrange their lives on my account.

One thing I will absolutely not do is join Alcoholics Anonymous or any other 12-step program. I know many good people who are involved with these groups and joining them is certainly preferable to drinking yourself to death, but the 12-step program is back-door religion. It tells its followers that they are powerless and can find salvation only in the inane catch phrases and prayers of its program. By some measures it is a cult. Your own free will is your highest power; anyone who tells you otherwise is only feeding you another form of poison.

So far I’ve made out fine without any prayers, group hugs or other nonsense. For me, quitting drinking was pretty easy. Instead of drinking something with alcohol in it I drink something without alcohol in it. I always was a big soda drinker, and I’ve resigned myself to enjoying that vice if nothing else. I’m the only person I know who sneaks non-alcoholic beverages into concerts.

I could tell you that drinking soda is just as much fun as drinking beer or bourbon, and that if you quit drinking you’ll be high on life, but that would be bullshit. But a lot of people have the attitude that I once had that life would be impossible without drinking, and that’s bullshit too.

Snowdumb

New York City’s most recent blizzard may be the sixth biggest snowfall the city has ever received, but its likely the worst response on record to a blizzard by people paid to clean it up and keep things running.

More than 48 hours after snow stopped falling, many streets have not been plowed or have not been plowed sufficiently. Mounds of snow normally removed by now still remain. Sidewalks in busy areas of Manhattan (which always gets better service than the outer boroughs) are still wastelands of snow.

The city sanitation department said that they are short staffed, but another city official said that New York has the same number of workers assigned to snow removal as per usual. This could be a work slowdown ploy by sanitation workers and their union to pressure the city to restore budget cuts. Budget cuts and the intensity of the storm certainly play a role in the city’s feeble response, but after two days the city should be in much better shape than this.

Numerous city busses became stuck on unplowed roads—and we’re not talking about obscure roads or small alleys, busses were stranded on First Avenue.

Some subways became prisons. One A train was stuck in Queens for about 10 hours (I’ve been arrested twice and my total time in a holding cell for both arrests didn’t total 10 hours). Other rail lines had horror stories as well. When I arrived at the 207^th St. A train station Monday morning, the stairs had not been shoveled. The Internet was alight camera phone-photos taken by incredulous commuters of snow inside train stations.

When I arrived home from work earlier tonight, cars trying to drive down my street were blocked by Parks Department vehicles. Parks Department employees milled aimlessly with shovels, ignoring the cars honking their horns trying to get down the street.

We are still cooling off under mountains of snow. When the city government collectively shits the bed at a time of disaster, heads must roll.

More Christmas, Less Christianity

It’s the holidays and ’tis the season to celebrate our lives and spread joy to those in it.

While my respect for humanity has not diminished, I have come to appreciate other human beings less. This is especially true when people are in thrall to both senseless spending and senseless charity.

Let’s embrace the celebratory feast of the harvest season and marvel at surviving another year. If you have food in your stomach and a roof over your head on Christmas, you’re doing better than a lot of people. Be happy about that. Buy generous presents for those that you love, but don’t be gaudy about it.

We can do without the mind-numbing consumer nihilism or the hackneyed love fest foisted upon us by delusional Christianity. Both are sad sides to the same coin. Mindless altruism is no less a detriment of character than mindless consumerism.

Grab Christmas by the throat. Open that egg nog, breath deep the evergreen, and station yourself strategically under some mistletoe. Let’s resolve to mulch our enemies along with our Christmas trees.

Here’s to more Christmas and less Christianity. Merry Christmas.

Taking a Leak on Secrecy

Critics of WikiLeaks act as if the Web site is out to flush democracy—and with all the “leaks” and document “dumps” I am overwhelmed by the fantastical bathroom imagery long overdue in our discourse on government—but really miss the scandals that should-have-been.

The latest disclosures by the gadfly Web site have made things tough for the State Department under Hilary Clinton. Certainly we’ve been damaged diplomatically, but certainly less so than by the Iraq war, extraordinary rendition from friendly countries and decades of myopic foreign policy.

Where WikiLeaks really blundered was in its first big release of documents concerning the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It released the names of informers, interpreters and others working for the U.S., thus endangering their lives and making things more difficult for the lives of our military. When human rights groups criticized WikiLeaks for this, founder Julian Assange blamed them for not helping his organization sort through what he had. If you don’t know what you’re publishing, why are you publishing it?

And have the latest leaks been that dramatic or informative? That the government of Afghanistan is horrendously corrupt is not exactly news to anyone who’s opened a newspaper in the last eight years. I’m not surprised that we’re launching missiles from drones in Yemen, and your average Yemeni Al Qaeda sympathizer isn’t either. The revelations about their government lying about it may create some terrorist sympathizers there, but it won’t turn anyone who wasn’t leaning in that direction to begin with.

The usual litany of plastic patriots is calling these leaks an act of treason. In order for something to legally be considered treasonous, I believe that Congress has to legally declare war, something it hasn’t had the courage to do since 1941. Also, since WikiLeaks’ founder is Australian and the Web site’s server is now hosted by a Swiss company, their offenses, whatever they are, are not treasonous. I understand the outrage over disclosing secrets that can endanger American lives, but find it hard to take seriously coming from people who had no problem sending our military into two theaters of war without proper supplies, or on a hunt for weapons in Iraq that weren’t there.

And for all its faults, and assuming the worst about its founder and its intentions, having information public is better than not in a democracy. We the people should always err on the side of free speech and free access to information. However bad too much information can sometimes seem, it’s always better than the alternative.

Prohibition Is ‘Loko’

Here in New York, while our infrastructure crumbles, our city and state governments go broke, schools fail, crime increases, and unemployment remains high, our political leaders busied themselves engaged in modern-day prohibition and forced an alcoholic beverage off the shelves.

Store owners have until Dec. 10 to sell whatever Four Loko they have left. The beverage, which contains generous helpings of alcohol and caffeine, has been called “blackout in a can,” by drinking aficionados and moralizing politicians. Several other states have moved to ban the drink and others like it.

Without getting into the argument against the ban on alcohol for people under 21, the more recent problem of young people harming themselves with these drinks could be solved by enforcement of already existing laws. Also, now that it has been outlawed, stores are going to sell out of Four Loko fast, and more kids will be encouraged to drink it to see what the fuss is about.

Somewhere people are hard at work thinking of the next legal way for people to annihilate their brain cells, because people will buy products that get them drunk and/or high. They always have, always will. You can outlaw anything you want; people are going to find new ways to fuck themselves up. Have faith in the powers of human invention and the drive to escape reality. A year or two from now, the government will ban something new.

Also, doesn’t it occur to anyone in government that Americans have the right to be drunken idiots? It’s our right to poison ourselves slowly with tobacco, alcohol or (in my case) caffeine. So long as it’s not poisonous or fraudulently labeled, the government should not interfere with our right to drink disgusting drinks until we puke ourselves.

Do not give one inch on anything. If it’s legal today, make sure it stays legal. Yesterday it was clove cigarettes. Today it’s Four Loko and similar drinks. Tomorrow it will be double cheeseburgers. They’ll pry a bottle of Diet Pepsi from my cold, dead fingers.

Smart Phones Do Not Make Smarter People

Bowing to the demands of the modern age, which accelerates in its adaption of new technologies at an exponential rate, I recently became one of the last of my friends to upgrade to a “smart” phone.

I am not at all what technology experts call an “early adopter” of technology. I would have been fine to do without a cell phone, except that everyone insisted on using them and I got tired of looking like some kind of crack head bum in search of a working pay phone.

The term “early adopter” refers to people so obsessed by technology that they will wait in line for six hours to spend too much on a piece of technology that will be obsolete in two weeks. Were you one of the first on your block to own an iPhone? Congratulations, you’re an idiot. The iPhones are becoming obsolete faster than they can make them, and one of the newer versions was plagued with problems.

I had planned on holding out for at least another year before buying a smart phone. I thought that maybe the prices would go down some more or technology would improve somehow just enough to make the added expense negligible. But I relented under peer pressure and an attractive brochure in the mail.

Improved technology has created a convenient universe of irresponsibility. The convenience of communication has devalued that communication. It no longer matters for many people to be on time for meetings or events. They figure that if they send you a text message around the time they were supposed to meet you, it is the same as showing up. Since technology exists for our convenience, people think everyone and everything else exists for their convenience also. Cell phones and Internet-capable hand-held devices have only further discouraged people from planning ahead, which is not a good thing. If anything, we as a society do not spend nearly enough time on thinking ahead.

Texting is one of the most despicable forms of communication available today, and is used with great fervor by the younger generation (the younger generation today includes anyone who graduated high school after 1995). I absolutely refuse to use the shorthand that is so common among texters (e.g.: - r u going 2 bed? – OMG, me 2!), as this is the language of cretins and pre-pubescent girls. And as someone who prides himself on decent writing, I want to use proper capitalization and punctuation at all times, things that texting on a regular cell phone makes very difficult to do at all and impossible to do quickly. I was content to do without texting, but too many people insist upon doing it, and I had to get an unlimited texting plan lest my phone bill be too high.

The smart phone should enable me to send text messages without losing my mind. So far, instead of making errors by not hitting the right button the requisite number of times, I’m making errors by hitting the wrong buttons on the very small screen keyboard. Technology is always finding new ways of improving your life while at the same time annoying the shit out of you.

The Answer to Bullying: Ass-Kicking Gays

A recent spate of suicides by gay teenagers has our media and our left-leaning political leaders up in arms about gays being bullied.

When I was a freshman in high school, someone threw a grape at me in the school cafeteria. The grape hit me in the face and I picked it up to throw it back. A much larger senior stood up and said he had thrown it at me. Without thinking, I threw it back at him, which was his excuse to charge at me. I got my skinny freshman ass kicked, and it sucked. But that didn’t matter. I showed everyone I was willing to take on someone bigger and stronger, and no one ever picked a fight with me in high school ever again.

Middle school and high school are like prison. You have to show your fellow inmates you’ll fight back, or you’ll forever be stepped on. It doesn’t matter if you lose; it matters that you fight back. Verbally or physically, people need to stand up for themselves.

Bullying has been with us forever, it was going strong when I was growing up and will be with us generations from now. The answer to bullying is to make sure we have kids who are confident in themselves and think independently. Let’s spend more resources raising kids who think for themselves and fight back.

We don’t need to wear purple, wave rainbow flags, or weep about how special and beautiful everyone is. Too much of our culture already celebrates the effeminate and the weak. We don’t want children who are mindlessly accepting any more than we want children who are mindlessly hateful. And we don’t want to tarnish our freedoms by passing more unconstitutional hate crime laws.

The truth is not everyone is special and lovable. There are plenty of useless people in the world who don’t deserve our sympathy. What we need to stop this allegedly epidemic bullying of gays are more badass gays.

And so I present to you some proud members of the LGBT—now called the LGBTQA(WTF)—community who will serve as better role models for our homosexual youth.

1. Gary Floyd: If you think it’s tough being openly gay today, try being a gay, communist punk rocker in Texas 25 years ago. As the lead singer of The Dicks, Floyd denounced police, homophobes and other things that annoyed him without apology. The Dick’s song ‘Saturday Night at the Bookstore’ is a frustrated gay rant that is one of the angriest and most punk of punk rock songs. Another openly gay punk band from that same era was The Big Boys, also from Texas. Big Boys singer Randy “Biscuit” Turner, who passed away in 2005, was also a noted skateboarder.

2. Pat Patterson: Lots of gays have survived bullying and the disapproving stares of the general public, how many have survived an alley fight match with Sergeant Slaughter? Pat Patterson’s homosexuality was considered an open secret in the wrestling world for many years, and he continues to work in wrestling today as a talent scout and producer. Chris Kanyon more recently made news when he came out of the closet. Like body building and lots if not all other sports, pro-wrestling has long catered to homophobic fans at the same time it has had a consistent gay following.

3. Bob Mould: Bob Mould is where wrestling and punk rock converge. As the singer and guitar player for the punk band Hüsker Dü, Mould allegedly kicked anyone in the head who spit on him (spitting on your favorite punk rock band was a big tradition back in the 1970s and early 1980s). He later went on to be a writer for World Championship Wrestling.

4. G.G. Allin: I know, I know, G.G. Allin was a bisexual and a violent drug addict who threw poop at people. But so what? Who was going to bully a naked man covered in his own blood and feces? G.G. Allin would punch you in the face at his show and then let you perform fellatio on him afterwards. Even at his worst, Allin’s music beats anything by Clay Aiken.

5. Wanda Sykes: the world of sports provides us with plenty of tough lesbians. Wanda Sykes stands out as an outstanding comedienne. And surviving in comedy, especially when performing at a lot of black comedy clubs where hecklers are notoriously merciless, is tough.

6. Christopher Marlowe: Marlowe was one of the bravest writers ever. He lived in the time of William Shakespeare and some conspiracy theorists claim he is the actual author of Shakespeare’s plays. He was gay and an atheist when both could get you killed legally. Marlowe worked as a spy, was accused of blasphemy and was murdered mysteriously. What poets and playwrights today have half that courage?

7. Rob Halford: Lead singer of Judas Priest, Halford is one of the gods of heavy metal. “I don’t know why so few people caught on,” he said after coming out of the closet in the 1990s, “I was always dressed like one of the Village People.”