Archive: August 2004
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What I did on my summer vacation
While you were in some Hampton, listening to Peter Frampton, I was in NYC, listening to BDP. It’s part of my annual tradition to spend as little time as possible outside of Manhattan during the summer season. I feel much like Charlton Heston wandering through the post-apocalyptic world of both The Omega Man and his dementia-addled brain, lost in an abandoned urban dystopia peopled by bizarrely-costumed mutants. Actually, since I live in the Lower East Side, it’s pretty much like this year-round, but how would you know? You left town. I’m here to tell you what you missed.
Let me break it down for you.
Dinner specials. During the month of August, many five-star, très exclusif restaurants offer promotions to attract the few dozen people who remain in town and whose financial and body-image status allow them to regularly eat meals. I participated in several, including the turducken and bottomless Martini at the James Beard House for $11.99, a late-night wine tasting at Coffee Shop in which slumming supermodels spit the wine into your mouth for fifty cents a throw, and an invigorating “steak crawl” through midtown at $24.99 per person. I planned to attend, but missed out on, the Supermarket Spree at Chelsea Market, where everything you could cram into a shopping cart in ten minutes was cooked by Emeril Lagasse into a giant ravioli. My understanding is that he made funny onomatopoetic noises while doing this.
Urban youth with no more teachers, books. They retained many dirty looks, however. Every time I passed by the many celebrated parks in our garden-jeweled urban wasteland, I was struck by the effects of discrimination on at-risk teens. Specifically, every encounter on the b-ball courts showed that, just like in the world at large, those who got game were unfairly advantaged over those who had not so got. What is billionaire/mayor Bloomberg going to do about this? I heard he takes like six steps before he dribbles, and still can’t make the lay-up. He is truly not the man they refer to when they say they want to be like Mike. Or, as John Kerry would put it in one of his trademark, witty indictments of the Bush Administration, “You. Got. Served.” Okay, next item.
Republicans. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a Republican up close, and I wasn’t about to start now, but that’s okay, because they felt the same way about me. Cloistered inside the bunker-like Madison Square Garden for brief periods each day in which they constantly reminded us of their plan for “Four more years [of hell]”, they were not known to venture into the wilds of the Lower East Side where Ricanstruction is ongoing. A guy I know who was a waiter at Windows on the World and is now a waiter in a midtown restaurant where a Republican meet-and-greet was staged, reported that while fat, bald guys from Alabama were very proud of the president’s response to the events of September 11, 2001, he himself — who witnessed those events, and the response, and the effects of the response — was not. What more can be said? As George Bush might put it, there’s nothing complicated about not supporting his failure.
Tits. Whether or not there are more tits in Manhattan during the summer is immaterial, and it seems that if anything, there must be fewer. But you see more of them. They are everywhere in the landscape. This one girl I passed on Delancey was sporting like five or six. As soon as the mercury starts rising, the tits start busting out all over. As harrowing as this can be for someone like myself who thinks enough about tits when there aren’t any, it is also sort of comforting, because you know if you trip and fall, you will probably be saved by the soft cushion of everybody’s fucking tits fucking everywhere. So enough with the tits. Let’s go back to the usual method of you only show me your tits if you like me.
So welcome back to New York, you foul-weather friends. I will see you at the bar!
by Jack, 9:42 PM | Link | Comments (0) | More from The Damned Human Race
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