Archive for June, 2008

28
Jun
08

99.44% Pure What?

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Uncategorized
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Is there a more vile substance in all this earth than Ivory soap? The moment I open a package — assuming I can scrape the vacuum-sealed skin-tight paper from the bar — I have to sneeze and I feel like I have to throw up a little. It is concentrated evil.

It looks like frozen lard chopped into fist-sized bars. It feels like a lump of laundry detergent, and it seems to suck all moisture out of the air around it. I imagine the poor souls who produce the stuff in factories. Their noses and throats must be as raw as ground beef. Their skin must be as dry as Bob Newhart. And we are delighted to scrub down babies with it.

I picked up some Lever 2000 yesterday.

28
Jun
08

Defending Territory

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Animals and My Cat
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What is it about a dog that encourages people with no interest in each other under normal circumstances to interact with each other?

Since I have been dog-sitting these last few days for a traveling friend, I have earned all kinds of attention. Carrying a dog, puts one in an instant spotlight. I am not just the anonymous guy who wants to be left alone on his way around the block. I am A Guy with a Cute Little Dog. People come out of the woodwork to say hi — just not to me.

“You have a beautiful puppy,” a woman said on the sidewalk. Absent the dog, would she have thought to remark about the weather or stop to tell me my zipper is down? Hardly. The dog invites the niceties.

Even my surly neighbor, with her enormous, thuggish boyfriend, crouched down in the elevator on the dog’s first day in the building. “Hey, there,” she said allowing the dog to sniff her hand. When she asked me “What’s her name?” I counted the most words she had said to me in a year.

“Honey,” I said.

“Oh, how cute.”

“Yeah, she’s just visiting,” I said gamely but awkwardly, startled by the excitement I felt, hopeful we might speak more. Maybe she’s nicer than she seems, I thought.

But that was it for three floors.

Conversely, the harmless old guy on the subway had a lot to say as I held Honey on my lap in her stylish polka-dot carrier bag. “Is it a boy or a girl?”

“A girl.”

“She looks tired.”

“Yeah, she’s had a busy day.”

    Honey
Honey rides in style on the G train. Heh… “Honey on the G Train.” Sounds like the title of an urban porn film.

I realized for the first time the power of talking about yourself through your dog. I should try it more often. Honey’s not coming to work today. Honey doesn’t feel like doing the laundry. What I was really saying was that I was tired and didn’t want to talk. Don’t come closer to pet my dog, and don’t ask me questions about her. I am just minding her for a friend. Apart from her breed and her name, I don’t know much.

“I bet you she’s just going to go right to sleep when you get her home.”

“Hmmm.” With any luck, I thought, I will.

“How old is she?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“How old do you think she is?”

“I have no idea. Maybe three?”

He directly addressed Honey with various and sundry encouraging affectations, though I couldn’t properly hear him through the rasp in his voice and the din of the wheels on steel.

“May the wind be at your back and God hold you in the palm of his hand. That’s Irish wisdom,” he said to me after downing a tea-colored 50 mL bottle.

About as Irish as that whiskey, I thought.

Usually what I get is a “Mira! Perrito!” from small children as Honey races by on the sidewalk eager to sniff the next clump of weeds at the edge of a neighbor’s lawn.

I felt like a prick when a couple of parents clearly wanted me to stop with the dog, but I merely smiled and continued walking right past them even as they stopped so their stroller-bound child could see her. I just defer to the dog. She doesn’t want to stop, and neither do I. So I let her dictate the next move. Sorry, I’d totally stop, but my dog … well, you know how she can be.

It’s a strange feeling to interact with people while being invisible. A family with two small children was talking about the dog on the train the other day. The kids would wave and make funny faces at Honey while their ice cream cones dripped on the floor. Their parents said encouraging things to them en Español. And every time I looked up, the kids turned away, looking embarrassed, and the adults stopped talking. Turn away, and they burst into action. Look up, and silence.

My cat doesn’t care how big Honey is or what her carrier bag looks like. Her primary concern is the strange new intruder.

She outweighs the dog by at least 50%, and Honey is scared of her. She won’t walk past her. We keep them separated, but Mukau camps out at the doorway of the spare bedroom where we keep the dog, guaranteeing that she stays there.

They get along fine, as long as they stay out of each other’s way, but sometimes out of the clear blue Mukau just gets it into her head to mess with the dog. I was giving the cat some extra attention one day thinking she may be getting resentful of our houseguest, and in the middle of a hearty belly scratch, she leapt to her feet, darted across the floor, and started hissing and batting at poor Honey. It’s like, “Ooh, that’s good. Up a little bit. Up. Yeah, right there… Ohhh… Oh — wait a minute. Sorry, there’s um… this thing… that I, um… forgot to do. Be right back. Won’t take me a minute. Just gotta scratch this dog’s eyes out.”

28
Jun
08

The Crazies

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: New York and People We Don't Like
Tags: ,

He stepped into the subway car and announced in full voice, “I never met a woman who wasn’t a government agent.”

And then I turned up my iPod. He continued to rant, but I could only see his lips move. Then I looked down. Don’t make eye contact.

I am thankful for the little blessings in life, such as the ability to tune out this stuff. But I am also grateful for the ability to tune it back in on demand. If memory serves, I recognized this guy as the same one who once declared that lesbians like to eat fish. I wondered at the time what might have given him such expert status. Clearly he has issues with women of all stripes. I clicked PAUSE.

Apparently it was a short story he had to tell. The next thing I heard him say was just a recap. “I never met a woman who wasn’t a government agent.” And, thank sweet Jesus, I was able to turn the music back on.

Sometimes you can avoid these visitations. As the subway is rolling to a stop at the platform, you see one empty car among a dozen jam-packed cars. Too good to be true? Yes. Don’t enter it. Usually a homeless person is sleeping inside under a pile of coats and blankets, and the odor of months-unwashed clothing, rancid breath, festering human tissue and, very likely, near-death illness is enough to keep the car clear.

A subway car suddenly overtaken by a noisy class of teenage girls on a school field trip is also enough to send one running in the other direction. I have even left a car to avoid an aggressive panhandler. (He threw someone’s change out the door at a stop, because he felt disrespected.) But sometimes you are too tired to move and you just close your eyes, turn up the volume, and hope it will end.

26
Jun
08

Shh! I Can’t See!

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Friends, Music, New York and People We Like
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One of the finest examples of those things that make remember why you love New York City is the New York Philharmonic’s free Concerts in the Park series. (Other cool free stuff in parks includes Shakespeare in the Park, Broadway Under the Stars, Bryant Park Summer Film Festival and the River to River Festival.)

One could go for the performance alone. It is one of the world’s finest concert orchestras. But plunked down at one end of Central Park’s Great Lawn, and playing to a crowd in excess of 60,000 and relying on a speaker system distributed throughout 13 acres, the full range and power of the orchestra is lost. The music on Tuesday night was fine, a simple roster of crowd-pleasers, a little “1812 Overture,” a couple of standard-issue Sousa marches — nothing too challenging.

But what makes the event is the gathering of friends, the wine and cheese and chips and wine and baguettes and wine, the crossover of strangers from picnic blanket to picnic blanket. It’s a rare moment when we all stop fussing with our super-important lives, take a breather to appreciate some of the beauty we literally pass by every day, and come together like a real community. It’s when New York is New York. Thousands of us all there for one thing: each other. And, by extension, the other guy. And, by extension, the other guy…

I brought five bottles of wine with me, a nice mix of reds and chilled whites, including a nice soave my friend Jamie seemed particularly delighted by. So much picnicking! So much conversation! So many people wandering around on cell phones trying to find their friends!

Seriously — “What did we do before cell phones?” We arrived on time.

A star-filled night (as star-filled as you get in the City) overtook the dusk, and soon we were surrounded by citronella candles and miniature flashlights and glowing cell phones and those infernal multi-colored phosphorescent plastic whips parents are powerless against purchasing for their kids. The Philharmonic stopped, and the fireworks began.

Fireworks never fail to delight me. They are so pointless and wasteful … but they are so brilliant! It’s like, we’re so happy to be alive and to be there that all we can think to do is light stuff on fire and hurl it up into the sky and watch tiny bits of metal burn and fall back to the earth.

The funniest part about the fireworks was the silence in the crowd. All through the performance, there was a low roar of chatter. People were talking about the workday, their vacation, their friends and family, the performance. Laughing. Shouting, “I’m right here waving my arms. See? No. Next to the tree on the other side of the speaker. No, the one with the pink and blue balloons — yeah — see me n— Yeah. Yeah. I’m right here. See me?” into their bloody cell phones. We even saw some guy propose to his girlfriend. We presume she said yes. Or at least that she would consider it.

But as soon as the instrument cases were latched tight, and the Philharmonic loosened their neckties, and we all turned southward to face the fireworks, everyone shut up. It was as if we had to … so we could see.

It reminds me of that line line in Ghostbusters when Ray says, “Listen! Do you smell something?”

It makes the eventual “Oh!” and “Ooh!” stand out. It sounds funny. Like we’re surprised. Like we haven’t seen it all a hundred times before. So my drunk friends and I started saying other vowel sounds, just for the sake of variety. “Aye!” “Uuuuh!” “Eeee!” They seemed as legitimate as the old standbys.

Then we moved on to consonants. “Fffff!” “Kkkhhh!” (which sounds a lot like a sneeze.) “Mmmm!”

It quickly degenerated into animal sounds. “Baa-aa-aah!” “Rrreeow!” “Waak waak!” “Moooo!”

We had killed the silence with our own performance. And the people nearby could hear us more clearly than they could hear the orchestra. I secretly dared someone to shush me. “Why?” I would ask. “Can you not see over the noise?” Annoyance with us would seem hypocritical to me, following a performance that many of them hadn’t even really listened to.

But apparently they had not come to see us, and no one said a word about it. They just continued to gaze back up into the sky, their eyes and mouths wide open, holding each other or holding themselves in the chilly summer night air.

And then it was over.

26
Jun
08

A Disaster Waiting

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Uncategorized
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Everyone has something that sets his hair on end. Fingernails on a chalkboard. A high-pitched dog yapping. Bugs and spiders. An old high school friend of mine could not even bear to look at a picture of a snake in a science book. I know someone for whom the thought of touching raw wood is literally nauseating. Mixing that brownie batter with a wooden spoon? As good as a toothbrush down the throat. A doctor with a tongue depressor? Call an ambulance.

For me, it’s glass — from a paper-thin martini glass to a gigantic window pane. This morning, walking the dog we’re sitting this week, I was already annoyed that she was stopping for a thorough examination of every five feet of sniffable surface. But when she picked a tree to piss on that placed me right next to a parked glass-delivery truck, my ankles began to sweat.

The truck backed up, and I tugged the lead slightly to encourage Honey to move on. I eyed the layered panes, completely stationary and secure yet still threatening at any moment to spontaneously shatter and explode, embedding irretrievable shards into my face and neck and arms. I imagined one of the larger ones buckling under its own weight to send a shimmering guillotine sliding down on my neck.

How does that truck make it all the way from the shop without shattering its cargo all across the highway? Why are the sheets of glass all arranged on the outermost edges of the truck bed — where they can do ordinary citizens the most harm? How do those workers each still have all 10 of their fingers? How can you allow small children and old people to pass within close proximity of this truck?

I have also always intensely disliked floor-to-ceiling mirrors. For one thing, in a home it’s usually just tacky and done for all the wrong reasons. (Want to make your room look bigger? Knock out a wall. Move into a different apartment.) Mostly, though, it’s just the sheer size of that sheet of glass. Moving a large unframed mirror from a friend’s apartment to another friend’s pickup truck, there was a moment when I thought it might slip through the gap between the elevator and the floor. It could easily happen. Loosen your grip for less than a blink, and someone’s certain death is suddenly hurtling through 32 floors of elevator shaft.

Glass table tops? Gag me. Ever see Heathers? Or that other movie (I think it’s a David Lynch) where the guy falls into the corner of a glass coffee table and it hacks halfway into his head — starting with the eye — like a sharp hatchet through a boiled egg?

When I first moved to my neighborhood, I met my ultimate horror in a set of glass shelves in a storefront window. Rising maybe five or six levels, each horizontal pane is suspended by a set of four tall, narrow pint glasses. A little too much weight on any one shelf, and you’ve got yourself a death scene. What merchandise could possibly be worth such a risk?

the untallied hours