Bullshit

Hey gang: This is a little essay that appeared in my local newspaper a few years ago. I wrote a number of these for the fun of it back in the day, so I thought I’d just repost a few. This one has been lightly edited to bring it up to date in some areas.

I can’t help but obsess about the PATH train, since I have now spent more time riding the PATH train than I’ve spent doing anything else over my entire lifetime. When I pass on, pantsless and forgotten behind some convenience store, a bottle of antifreeze my only comfort, I’ll probably see nothing but the interiors of PATH trains when my life flashes before my eyes. That might sound depressing, but it isn’t so bad; I’ve had plenty of high times and grand adventures during the half hour ride from Erie Lackawana to Penn Station. What I’ll mainly remember from the PATH rides, of course, are the humongous backpacks that people have battered me with on crowded trains.

I think from time to time we’ve all found ourselves jammed onto a train that seems to be holding more human bodies than the laws of physics would allow. Then again, my own understanding of physics is drawn mainly from old Twilight Zone reruns, and informs me that the universe is run by Oompah Loompahs, so perhaps my understanding of how many people can fit inside a train car is a little off. But we’ve all found ourselves pressed up against the car doors, closer to other human beings than we’ve ever wanted to be, unable to move. Invariably, there are a few people on the train who are wearing huge backpacks about twice as large as they are, and invariably they don’t take these backpacks off when they get on the train, and invariably they end up beating me about the face and neck with these backpacks.

The only conclusion you can draw is that most people have no idea how much space they take up, and that they’re largely unaware of how much they bludgeon the people around them. These are the same people who make walking through the streets of Hoboken and Manhattan a contact sport, and they’re probably the same people who walk around during rainstorms with umbrellas the size of hot air balloons. In short, morons.

Walking the city streets during a rainstorm is hard enough because everyone has an umbrella up and they knock into each other—basically, an umbrella increases the space you take up, and you have to compensate in order to keep civilization moving smoothly down the sidewalks. When someone shows up with one of those circus-ring umbrellas you could fit sixteen midget clowns under, presumably so that not a single drop of terrible rain falls on their tender persons, it clogs up the whole system and invades my personal space.

Why do some people feel that their royal status requires that no rain ever get close to them despite the fact that it interferes with the smooth operation of civilization itself? The same reason they get on crowded trains with comically outsized backpacks: They have absolutely no idea how their actions impact other people. And, of course, when I say “other people”, I mean me. Now, I’m not advocating that people should dispense with their umbrellas and get soaked, or get rid of their comically oversized backpacks—or, lord forbid, actually take the backpack from their backs and hold them, since that would interfere with their idle Ipod-fondling—which they apparently use to carry every single thing they own from place to place. I’m just advocating that we all pause for a moment and remember that we’re all part of a society, that there’s supposed to be some consideration for your fellow man. Without consideration for your fellow man—especially in crowded, damp train cars filled with humid humanity—things can quickly devolve into a Lord of the Flies situation. All because of your umbrella, large enough to catch an updraft and pluck you off the street like a stray leaf. Which would, now that I think about it, amuse me greatly.

Space is part of it, too, of course. As the tri-state area slowly begins to resemble Tokyo in its allotment of living space to individual citizens, you start to get a little jealous of your personal space. The urge to assert yourself via an umbrella that forces everyone to stay three feet away from you in every direction—creating, if you will, a stranger-free zone, a bubble of transient personal territory—might be irresistible, albeit still inexcusable. The final result of this line of thinking, of course, is obvious, at least to me: Everyone inside their own hard plastic bubble, serenely rolling down the sidewalks with three feet of personal space all around, guaranteed, even on sunny days. Granted, you’d have the new worries over being accidentally bank-shotted into traffic and killed, but there are so many ways to be accidentally killed in this world, what’s one more?

Of course, once that happens I’ll probably just start complaining about people who install themselves in huge bubbles that take up the whole sidewalk, knocking everyone else out of the way as they rampage through the city. Which actually might be fun, come to think of it—or at least more fun than an umbrella spoke in the eye.

Hey gang: This is a little essay that appeared in my local newspaper a few years ago. I wrote a number of these for the fun of it back in the day, so I thought I’d just repost a few. This one has been lightly edited to bring it up to date in some areas.

Like a lot of people who live in the Northeastern United States, I’m obsessed with public transportation. IT dominates my existence in a way that few other places can equal. Sure, there are cars and highways here, but most of us end up taking alternative transportation some time, if only out of simple necessity. And sometimes that transportation comes in the form of a car service or taxi cab. And that’s when it usually hits me: I live my life at the mercy of madmen.

Cabbies and car drivers of all sorts work hard and are, for the most part, honest and sincere people who want nothing more than to do their job well enough and get paid fairly for it, which sets them immediately above me, a man who wants to do as little as possible and get startlingly overpaid for it. But I cannot be the only one who feels like he’s being inspected by a superior officer when I’m standing in line for a cab at the Hoboken bus depot. I step off the train and I’m a (possibly slightly inebriated) man of means, happy in his work and contributing to society. Get on the end of that cab line, and I’m a supplicant. The cabbies roll forward slowly, inspecting the line of people, and demand to know where you are going. If they don’t like the answer, they keep moving. I’ve seen people launch into complex negotiations involving the cabbie, themselves, strangers around them, and compromise intersections so elaborate I’m amazed anyone gets home at all.

Once you do actually convince one of the cabbies to accept you as temporary freight, you slide into the seat and you’re in their little spot in the world. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course; if I had to spend hours and hours driving strangers around—strangers who can probably be often rude and inconsiderate—I’d want the cab to be pretty much an extension of my home as well. But it’s a little unsettling, after spending five minutes negotiating the ten-minute cab ride, to find yourself sitting in the back seat of what feels like the cabbie’s living room, listening to their music or talk-radio choices and staring at their decorations. The worst is when they have to move and rearrange sixty pounds of personal possessions in order to surrender the front seat to you, as if the front seat were a customer demand so unexpected it stuns them momentarily with its originality.

Once on the move, most cabbies will then treat you as if you temporarily ceased to exist, as if riding in their cab was an experiment in teleportation or astral projection. They’ll talk on the phone, talk to themselves, hum tunelessly or drive in grim, frightening silence that makes me keep one hand on the door release in case I have to ditch at high speed. The message seems to be that they would much prefer their job as cabdriver not include any actual passengers, that the only real impediment to them really enjoying their job is you, so rudely taking up space in their car.

That’s preferable, of course, to friendly, chatty cabdrivers. There’s nothing wrong with some friendly human interaction with the person driving you home or to the airport, but sometimes you wonder if you’re on some sort of reality show. There are certain subjects I hesitate to discuss with my own family that have been raised, seconds into the ride, by cheerfully loud cabdrivers. Once in Seattle a genial cabby tried to pick up my three female friends and ended a fascinating ride by suggesting that they ditch me and stay in the cab with him, and just the other day while riding to the airport I learned more than I wanted to know about one cabdriver’s finances as he raged against the ridiculous prices of a Condo in Hoboken. Harmless, for the most part, and yet disturbing: After all, for the time you’re in the car, you’re pretty much in the cabby’s hands. He can drive you where he wishes and release you from the car when he chooses, and I can’t possibly be the only one who occasionally imagines I’m about to be sold into slavery to a fat South American crime lord who will force me to wear a thong swimsuit while I serve him drinks by the pool and who will call me Tuco. Or perhaps I am, but I’m used to it.

The thing is, if a bus driver goes nuts and decides it’s his time to ruin your afternoon, you’ve at least got a busload of people ready to assist you in mutiny. On a train, there’s at least a bunch of people who will share your horror when the train grinds to a halt and the lights go out. If your cab driver turns out to be taking a holiday from his meds, it’s just you and them, mano a driver. This wouldn’t bother me if I didn’t end up feeling like I was intruding on the free time of a crazy person half the time I’m in a cab.

Of course, sometimes you get to the bus station and not only are there no buses, but the cab line wraps around the block as everyone presents themselves and their destinations for inspection, and your only option for getting home in a timely fashion is to walk. But walking in Hoboken is a whole other essay.

Hey gang: This is a little essay that appeared in my local newspaper a few years ago. I wrote a number of these for the fun of it back in the day, so I thought I’d just repost a few. This one has been lightly edited to bring it up to date in some areas.

A few years ago, my wife was hit with a serious case of Puppy Madness. All day, every day, all I heard was her sincere desire to adopt a puppy. While grateful that her maternal instinct was manifesting in a way that wouldn’t require me to come to grips with my own mortality, I resisted this with every fiber of my being. I ignored her for as long as seemed safe—which isn’t very long—and prepared careful arguments against the idea using logic, reason, and incessant begging, occasionally augmented by that old standby, feigned unconsciousness. No one can argue about adopting a puppy when you’ve just collapsed on the floor, my friends.

I have nothing against puppies, or the idea of caring for a small furry animal. In fact, after I exhausted the wife on the puppy issue we ended up getting a kitten instead, which we named Pierre. Pierre has grown large and strong under our care and I have trained him to fetch bottles of beer from the kitchen, so all is well here in Hoboken. We subsequently acquired three more cats, meaning I have the same muscle mass as a Doberman running about the house. Cats are far superior to dogs because they are a) self-cleaning and require no walks and b) very quiet, requiring no effort to ignore completely, although care must be taken when walking to the bathroom late at night, lest you fall into the sitcom cliché of trying to purchase an identical cat before your wife wakes up in the morning. So, yes, cats are the low-maintenance choice, but the real reason I resisted the whole puppy issue is simple: I didn’t want to become one of those poor men you see around town. You know: Men with Little Dogs.

You see these poor guys on the street every morning or evening and you know the story instantly: Some woman in their lives, bursting with Puppy Madness, wanted or had a tiny little dog—the sort of dog you can stuff into a handbag for hours at a time, the sort of dog that shivers for no reason and which has to be carried most of the time because its tiny little legs can’t go very far, or very fast. Women with Puppy Madness tend to go for these tiny dogs because the dogs will resemble puppies pretty much their entire lives—it’s a Peter Pan syndrome afflicting dog owners. Despite declarations and promises to the contrary, it often—if not always—falls to the man in the relationship to walk the family dog, and the poor men, through no decision of their own, find themselves out in the rain at six in the morning with the tiniest rat-like dog possible on the other end of a leash.

I see them every day, and they are uniformly miserable. Ashamed, even. No self-respecting man wants a dog he can stuff into his pocket by accident. There’s nothing evil about toy dogs, and if the women want them they should certainly be allowed to have them—but put a grown man on the other end of those yelping, shivering beasts straining ineffectively against their leash and piddling every three feet, and you have a recipe for suicidal tendencies.

My wife tried to convince me this would not happen, that she’d happily walk the dog and take full responsibility for it, but I wisely didn’t believe her. I’m not indicating that she was lying to me, only that she was engaging in the traditional level of self-delusion when desire for a pet is involved. I remember when I was a kid and my brother and I wanted a pet—the lengths of self-deception we engaged in, all to convince our parents that we would care for that imagined pet as if it had been formed from one of our own ribs. The key to any deception, of course, is that you believe it. And I know my wife believed she would, indeed, walk that dog constantly. But I knew she wouldn’t. I knew I would end up walking it. And then I’d be yet another miserable grown man being led around Hoboken by some tiny dog—for about a block, at which point the genetically-inferior toy dog would give up, exhausted, and I’d end up having to carry it from tree to hydrant to other dogs, placing it gently on the ground so it could go to the bathroom. Not even giving the dog an ironic name like Bruiser or Sasquatch would save the situation.

So next time you see some guy hunched down in a raincoat one drizzly morning, attached by a leash to a yelping little rodent of a dog, don’t make eye contact. Have some pity and let him wallow in anonymity. As much as Men with Little Dogs are a part of the landscape and atmosphere of Hoboken, they should be pitied, and treated gently. Certainly pointing and laughing, like I do, is wrong.

Hey gang: This is a little essay that appeared in my local newspaper a few years ago. I wrote a number of these for the fun of it back in the day, so I thought I’d just repost a few.

Whenever friends visit me here in the Northeast United States, they usually treat public transportation as some sort of bizarre tourist attraction. While there are certainly other areas of the country that have well-developed public transit systems, few have achieved the penetration, saturation, and necessity that is the New York City area. While my hick visitors treat buses and subways like some sort of crazy ride devised to entertain them (“Look! Real graffiti! Ooh—do you think that guy has a gun?”) you and I regard them as absolute necessities. Most of us ride the bus and PATH trains every week, if not every day. Some of us, in a shocking situation people from, say, Texas will simply never be able to comprehend, don’t even have cars.

So, while visitors from places where you have to drive an hour just to pick up a pizza can act like riding the D train to Yankee Stadium is some sort of an amusement park ride, for me, public transit is how I get around, period. The trains of this area are my legs. Buses, too, of course. Which is unfortunate, since so many bus drivers are obviously insane.

The subways and the PATH train aren’t so bad, since the people operating them—if indeed there are people, since there are a lot of robot trains operating in Manhattan these days—are usually hidden away from public view, only rarely snuffling out of their little control rooms like the Phantom of the Opera, and sticking to the shadows. You can ride the PATH train for days on end and have almost no human contact at all, unless you count being jowl-to-cheek with complete strangers with questionable-at-best bathing habits—which I do not.

The buses, however, are driven by real live people, and most of them are crazy. You’re completely reliant on them to even get on the bus—who hasn’t stood there in the pouring rain as a devilish bus driver speeds past your stop, bus apparently empty, for no known reason? Or run a block and a half screaming for the bus only to have it pull away when you’re within feet of the front door, the driver gleefully ignoring your screams, your irate pounding, and even the shouts of protest from luckier commuters already on-board? Oh, the bus drivers are evil, that’s for sure. That would be bad enough—that would simply require guerrilla warfare, which I am prepared to wage for the right reasons. Or, to be totally honest, for no reason at all. The salt in the wounds is that if you do manage to gain admittance to a bus, going, say, from tenth and Washington in Hoboken to the PATH station, you have a good chance of being driven there by someone who has given up the struggle for coherency.

There is, for example, one jolly fellow who will offer the entire bus a running commentary about his opinions and impressions of Hoboken and the people who live there, as compared to his beloved Queens. Queens, apparently, is a paradise of bus drivers who know how to drive and citizens who know enough to fear the bus drivers. He complains that people cross the street in front of his bus and that traffic is terrible and that people don’t know how to drive—the monologue tends to repeat a bit at this point. I’m never sure who, exactly, he is talking to. I suppose someone could politely ask him to shut up, or at least to stop insulting us, but personally I’d be afraid to find out what kind of reaction that would elicit. I’m too young to die.

At least that guy speaks. I firmly believe in obeying the Rules of Polite Society, which form the basis for any civilized discourse, and one of those rules is that you don’t treat people performing paid services for you like they’re invisible. So I usually greet the driver when I get on the bus and I generally wish them a good day/night when I get off. Most of them at least grunt in my general direction, but there are a couple of zombie-like drivers who say nothing, and generally don’t even look at you. These cheerful souls are more than just rude: They’re disturbing. I have to wonder what kind of marvelous interior world they see as they drive their route with mechanical, memorized efficiency. It’s easy to imagine that there are no other people in this interior world, and that someday they might decide to take a bold step towards making that paradise reality. Whenever I get one of these unfriendly drivers I pick a seat near the emergency exit, just in case my evening ends with a thrilling escape from a burning bus.

The lessons are clear: You must always be ready to be in the power of an insane person, and prepared to fight them in hand-to-hand combat just to get home from work. Why would anyone live anywhere else?

Songs listened to while reading F. Scott Fitzgerald on the subway the other night:

1. On to The Next One – Jay Z
2. Let Me Put My Love Into You – AC/DC
3. Chicago Bump – Chicago, Amanda Blank, Spank Rock, Bloodhound Gang, Greg Bihn Band, Detroit Grand Pubahs, mashed by DJ Magnet
4. Goodbye Ohio – Too Much Joy
5. That Willy Wonka Song – Me First and the Gimme Gimmes
6. Paperback Writer – The Beatles
7. Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way – Waylon Jennings
8. Dumpweed – Blink 182
9. Bastards of Young – The Replacements
10. Head On – The Pixies

Apparently, I love and want to marry every video the band OK GO makes:

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

Yay.

Hey gang: This is a little essay that appeared in my local newspaper a few years ago. I wrote a number of these for the fun of it back in the day, so I thought I’d just repost a few.

When you live in Hoboken, you either live there in spite of the ubiquitous bars, or you live there because of the bars. And there are a lot of bars, that’s for sure—wherever you live in Hoboken, you are within three blocks of a tavern of some sort. So you’re either sitting up late at nights with a shotgun across your knees, gritting your teeth in rage because of all the noisy drunkards screaming in the street, or you’re one of the screaming drunkards. Or, like me, you once were one of the screaming drunkards and look back on that time fondly, vomit and all.

Living here, therefore, you learn pretty quickly how to navigate the bars. It’s a survival skill. And the first thing you learn is that there are, fundamentally, two types of bars. There may be infinite sub-categories within, but every bar can be boiled down to one of these: Old Man Bars, and everything else.

The Old Man Bar is a phenomenon that crosses borders, cultures, and, apparently, time. Sometimes referred to with the misleading term ‘neighborhood bar’, the Old Man Bar is a simple concept: It’s that bar you walk into and stop three steps in because staring back at you, blank-faced with disdain, are men uniformly over the age of fifty (with a couple of possible exceptions). Instantly, you know you’re not supposed to be in this bar, and you get the heck out of it as quickly as you possibly can.

Of course, there are plenty of men over fifty who don’t spend their days in Old Man Bars, and plenty of people over fifty who quite happily hang out at bars you wouldn’t term “Old Man Bars”. It’s not that all old men go to Old Man Bars, it’s that, invariably, Old Man Bars are peopled exclusively by old men. There’s nothing wrong with this, either, of course—live and let live, I say—but the fact is that if you aren’t already spending your time in an Old Man Bar, I know two things about you without having met you: One, you don’t want to be in an Old Man Bar, and two, the old men don’t want you in their bar either.

Aside from the unfriendly glares from the old men, you can tell an Old Man Bar from the uncannily consistent features it will sport:

1. It will be populated, but never crowded. There will be plenty of elbow room, and a sprinkling of patrons, most men over fifty—however, there may be one or two women, also over fifty, and even one or two of those old-before-their time younger men who have decided to get it over with and begin the serious business of drinking.

2. There will be a single pool table, much abused.

3. The jukebox will be playing something from 1973 when you walk in, and there won’t be an album more recent than 1980 on it.

4. There will be, at most, two beers on tap. It’s possible one of the taps won’t even work.

The best thing to do when you arrive inadvertently at an Old Man Bars to just back out silently and never return. Any instinct to be polite will not be appreciated, and will be uniformly painful for both sides. Besides, the bartenders in Old Man bars are usually bartenders by avocation, and any cocktail more complex than a Boilermaker will require a quick glance through a bartender’s handbook, not to mention a disdainfully raised eyebrow, so any request for a Cosmopolitan or a Dirty Martini will probably go unanswered.

No one knows, I don’t think, why this phenomenon is so common. Certainly a time comes when you’re too old for the crowded, loud, singles-oriented scene that most of Hoboken’s bars offer, but maybe you still want to meet friends for a drink once in a while, or every day, or just spend your time sopping up as much alcohol as possible before cirrhosis takes its toll. We all probably have an Old Man Bar in our future at some point, when the music gets too loud, the air too smoky, and the crowd too young. We’ll wander onto the dimly-lit side streets of Hoboken, croaking out our mating call, eventually hearing an old song from our youth on the warm air. And when we trace it to its source, we’ll find the Old Man Bar of our future, sparsely populated by people who know the same trivia as we do, and there’ll be plenty of room at the bar, and no screaming kids ordering sweet mixed drinks, and the occasional entertainment of watching a group of youngsters stumble in, stop dead, and quietly back out with wide eyes and trembling lips.