Did my road race today. Yay me!
Note to self: bring your number, and not just the safety pins, next time.
Also: Running seems to be very popular among the Dutch, judging from the number of people in orange in the race.
Less
More
Archive for the 'New York Fugging City' Category
And I even had my camera on me, too.
I was at a tiny farmer’s market in Park Slope today, where I bought roughly 20 pounds of tomatoes (yay fresh tomatoes! Yay sauce!), plus assorted fruit (plums! raspberries!) and vegetables (jalapenos! red and yellow peppers! garlic!). Skipped the pickle guy, even though his stuff looked good.
The last booth on the way back to the subway was that of Bubba Rose Biscuit Co., a doggy bakery based in Park Slope. The woman in the booth had a lot of tattoos, and it wasn’t until I was getting my change from her that I noticed the tattoo she had on her right bicep:
Mr. T’s head. Atop a cupcake.
So I’m out walking my dog this morning, and the guy down the street is standing on the sidewalk, trimming his hedges with an electric hedge trimmer.
Just as I’m walking behind him, he takes a step back and swings the still-running* trimmer to the side, without looking.
Right at my stomach.
Fortunately, I happened to be holding the leash in front of me, so the blades caught that, the leash became stuck between the two rows of blades, and the thing stopped running.
It took a lot of tugging and a lot of “Don’t turn it on again!” and cursing to get the leash extricated and get me the hell away from him.
And now I have pancakes.
_________
* I should clarify: he’d released the trigger, so it was not going full-bore, but while it had slowed, it hadn’t stopped.
Due to this morning’s torrential rains, the ENTIRE subway system has shut down, as well as parts of the LIRR and Metro-North commuter railroads. There’s nobody at my office now, which I’m sure will get the person who covers reception in the early morning screamed at by the petty tyrant even though there’s not a damn thing she can do about it.
My subway line has frequent delays due to bad weather (the “F” stands for “Fucked up”), flooding, freezing and the like. But the last time the entire friggin’ system shut down was 1999.
Mind you, the MTA is running a surplus, yet still wants to charge more per ride without actually adding any service.
Will I get arrested if I call the MTA commissioner a son of a bitch?
Ed Koch, Republican shill, is absolutely, positively sure that Michael Bloomberg is going to run for President.
Because we need another insanely rich moral scold with an annoying voice in the White House.
You’re quite talented, and one of the joys of New York City is that you never know what kind of talented musician or performer you’re going to run into on the subways. Just last night, I saw a jazz violinist, and there are breakdancers in the Grand Central subway station, and opera singers, and Mexican guitarists, and brass bands, and the washtub guy, and people playing Chinese instruments, and the Delta Blues folks, and a cappella four-part harmonies. And those Peruvian musicians, but I don’t like them very much.*
With all of that vast talent and variety out there, do you think you could maybe step it up a little and expand your repertoire beyond “Onward, Christian Soldiers”?
Thanks much,
Zuzu
________
*It all happened during Art Fair in Ann Arbor. The law school was on the corner of South State and South University, which were two of the major streets hosting Art Fair. There were Peruvian musicians, several groups of them. They set up at several points along South State and South U. And I could hear every minute that they played, eight hours a day, for five days. The same songs, over and over. And they’re *still* playing those same songs. I think they’re following me.
Cripes.
When I got back from Long Island Wednesday evening (client meeting, sprung on me at the last minute, on a day when it took me two hours to get into work due to track flooding, and the branch of the LIRR we needed to take was shut down, so we took a car), I got dropped off in Manhattan. When I got into the 4/5/6 Union Square station, there was a train in the station with a “not in service” message, and another message telling me that due to a police investigation at Grand Central, various trains on the 4/5/6 were not running. And when I say “various,” I mean “all.” Reason? In MTA-speak, “an investigation.”
I found another way home, grateful that at least at Union Square (versus my stop) they actually let you know the frickin’ train won’t be coming (did I mention it was TWO HOURS Wednesday morning before I got a train? Might have been less had they announced that the uptown trains were running express and, oh, NOT STOPPING at my stop, because Jeez, I could have, like, you know, fucking walked the 10 blocks or so to get there rather than wait TWO HOURS for a train. Only to find out they were stopping at my local stop by then. Bastids.
But I didn’t know about this steam pipe explosion. Crap! that’s literally a block and a half from where I worked until January, and that spiky building in the photo is the Chrysler Building, which is currently the second-tallest building in New York.
Shit blows up here from time to time. I remember a New Year’s Day in 1999 or so, when both a water main and a gas main burst at around the same time, so that not only did the street eat some cars, but it did it with a whole lake of fire effect. Apex Tech blew up one year. And so did some building on Madison (in the 50s — it housed the Vermont Teddy Bear Company, or maybe the building just slid down, it’s been a while) and a theater on 42nd collapsed. And a construction site in the 100s, not too far from where STAB BABY played out.
In fact, I wrote last year about the explosion of the E. 62d Street townhouse of one Dr. Bartha, who was determined to die in his beloved house before he allowed it to be sold to satisfy the divorce decree obtained by his long-suffering wife. And I commented at the time that freakin’ Al Qaeda was just ruining the intermittent explosions that happen in this town for various reasons — bad gas lines, arson, divorce, aged buildings, stupid pilots, what have you. I mean, it’s not frequent — I’ve been here 10 years and I think I’ve witnessed, oh, fewer than 10 weird-ass explosions. Time was when they’d have been written off as Life in the City — now, everyone freaks out about terrorism.
As if fiction could be stranger than truth in this town.
Recent Comments