I (heart) NY

Walking around NY City you’ll sometimes see things you wish you could immediately share with other New Yorkers. After agonizing that I would not be able to share these images with any more people in particular, I realized, “dammit, this is exactly what blogs are for,” so I’m sharing with YOU in particular, a few NY anecdotes.

Sono Ichi: Early evening, I see a man taking his infant son for a walk in the East Village. Dad’s a hip Tokyo expat with a cute half-caucasian baby (I’m sorry, wouldn’t that just be a Cauc-Asian baby??). The dad looks like he’s just finished a third straight shift at Yakitori Taisho or something (i.e. tired). He’s holding the baby like his arm is a thong (I’ll give you a second to visualize that). With the other hand, he has the baby by the nape, and the baby is WAILING. Hipster Tokyo Expat looks like he has no idea what he’s doing. He is exasperated and doesn’t seem to care that the baby is seriously begging to be killed. But then I see the dad make a beeline for a storefront window with puppy dogs. He scuttles quickly to the window and presses the kid up against it, and the kid. immediately. shuts. up.

Exasperated hipster dad’s solution to petulant baby is showing it puppies. Genius.

Sono Ni: On the same block is a man shaped like a huge papaya, I’d guess in his mid-70’s. He has a hearing aid and a mesh cap that says something unironic, like “Hat For Old People” or something like that. Three sets of 20-something women walk past him talking to each other or to someone on the phone, and each time, he yells at them.

“Look at you. You’re dressed like a hooker!”
“Jesus Christ. What are you WEARING!?”
One woman said on her phone in a quasi-Valley girl  tone “are you SERIOUS?  Oh my God!” and the man barked back, “YEAH I’M F***ING SERIOUS.”

There’s a certain je ne sais quois about New York Senility.

Sono San: I’m waiting in line for MUD coffee at one of their trucks. The woman in front of me is “jamming” circa 1989 – high top sneakers, headband, WalkMan. When she gets to the counter she is excited and talks up the hipster guy behind the counter who is wearing a Yankees cap. She is obviously a regular. She says at one point, “do you know if the Red Sox won?” and grimaced. Counter-boy says, “I don’t know, but I hope not.” Myself being a baseball lover and follower of Red Sox stats, said out loud, “they lost to the Rockies last night.” The woman made a sideways glare at me as if to say, “this is MY conversation. Back off, bitch,” and pretended not to have heard me. Obviously she didn’t care one way or the other about baseball. She was jamming and jabbering with hot Mud-Man. No problem there. I literally backed up and shut up.

Sono Yon: Found five baby cockroaches crawling around in my cat’s dry food bag this morning. Nice.
Do you have any New York stories you’d like to share (in the comments board)? Best one gets a copy of Paradise by Koji Suzuki (part of which takes place in New York).