Start By Oversleeping

First: the morning.
I never oversleep except I did this morning. It could have been a disaster, but it wasn't. I woke at 6:10 am instead at 5. There was still time to make the espresso, eat a half of a grapefruit with a piece of wheat toast. Turning on the radio for the weather forecast I heard a ad for Poise, that's a pill you give out to help your dog get rid of stress.

Hmmm.

There are several things that could bring stress to us non-dogs these days. It's important, they tell us several times each morning on the subway ride downtown, that we take note of any unusual activity on the platforms or in the cars. We are supposed to be on the lookout for any unattended packages or backpacks and report them to any nearby police officer.

My own theory on this is this:
that by the time the police officer returns to investigate,
the reported, unattended, bag will have already been stolen.

I keep expecting to see a news report about some shmuck who gets blown up while running up the stairs with a backpack not his own.
Ah.

We all need to be aware of how precipitous our national economic condition is and be on the alert for the Flu, both the type we get from pigs and the type we get from birds. We must decide now whether to start wearing plaid.

Cats have stress but they hide it better. They stay under beds until well after midnight and then slink around through the darkness.

We must watch what we eat and be aware of what is eating on us.
We have to take note of who amongst us does not have Killer White Teeth.
We should be on the lookout for other stains. And strains.
If we are already victims of gang stalking we ought not allow ourselves to be on a dark street late at night alone and thereby be singularly mugged.

In addition to the Poise pills, available in Quick or Long Lasting, the NYTIMES reports there is a seminar for people to take in order to learn how to de-stress their distressed dogs. Belly scratching is perhaps not as good as drugs.

The guy sitting one guy over from me on the train this morning was exuding so much scent of Marijuana that I was surprised to look up and not see the smoke surrounding his head like a wreath.

You can't get a cat to take a pill easily, especially an already stressed one, it would be easier to teach one to smoke a big doobie on it's bad days.

What was stressing me today was not being late and missing my morning workout, what was getting me was I had trimmed my thumbnails too short.

Now: the run home.
I had to go to Niketown at 5th and 57th Street to pick up my chip and shirt for Sunday's God's Love We Deliver race. It was drizzling rain. Photographers were out in force because drizzling rain makes the edges of the city softer. It makes everybody else just a little grim.

Plaid is supposed to be making a comeback this year but you wouldn't know it from the windows at Bloomingdales. Nary a plaided person anywhere to be seen.
What I did see were several people who might be in need of swiping some of their dog's Poise.
There was the guy with the flat tire, dressed to go somewhere but facing a wrestling match with a wheel.
Two woman were steaming at the corner of 57th and Lexington with one yelling into her cellphone about "The next thing I know Heather is calling me!". The other woman staring at her in fierce, nodding, agreement.

I picked up my shirt. I choose a Medium. No more extra larges or larges for me.
They had no bags, so I had to clip the safety pins and the race number to the shirt and roll the whole thing up and run with it tucked under my arm.

There was another tense guy at 59th Street by the Park. He had his arm outstretched and was screaming into the phone in his hand but at a pitch and volume that made it impossible to understand a single word he was spitting, er, yelling. I wonder what he sounded like at the other end?

The park was lovely, dark and deep and drizzly. I shut my MP3 player off and listened to the whispers and wisk-wisk-wisk of my shoes. Up the hill by the reservoir turn, a man was telling his big retriever to hurry up and cross the road. The dog sort of moseyed on over, not in any rush, happy to be in the park even in rain. She picked up her pace once across and nuzzled up to her guy. I don't think there is any Poise back at their house.

Oh, I almost forgot. When I cut my thumbnails too short, it's really hard to type anything on my phone. There are a lot of typos, but I didn't yell at the phone. Not even once.

Hole-y Days are here again

When you live in New York City you expect things to be big and fast. Problems are always big, solutions are only sometimes fast. So when they called me and told me that the street had collapsed in front of the building next door, first I said "Again?" Because three years ago we had to have the city put on notice that we were going to file a lawsuit if they didn't fix the drooping pavement (that time it was across the street).



Anyway, I got home and saw this:



The electricity was on at least, that was a good thing. The water was off, but there had been assurances made that it would be back on by midnight. The same kind of assurances that are made by baseball team managers every Spring regarding the prospects for the coming year.
We all shrug at these things. If it happens, it happens. That should be the motto of this city.
=======
So about ten thirty when the hot water heater started making odd chugging sounds and I could get water(with a lot of air) out of the kitchen faucet, I was not surprised, just relieved. Then the water stopped running.
I just went to bed.
And here's what it looked like in the morning:



What a city.

And I Can't Keep My Eyes from Crying

New York Manhattan Upper West Side Midway between the 72nd and 59th Street Stations Front left corner seat of the downtown A train.



It happened again this morning and if I don't make a point of remembering it now, the instance will disappear amongst all the other input, visual, audible and otherwise, that the city force-feeds you. I was on the way to an early morning Sunday run in the park when I saw a woman in tears.



She was sitting next to another woman, a friend, who was nodding seriously as the crying woman talked and wept and wiped her eyes and wept some more. There are few more private moments than those of sorrow. I say it happened again because this is the fourth or fifth instance in the past month where I have come upon someone in grief.



The first was a man. Standing mid-sidewalk, stock still, head down, arms by his sides, the tears dropping from his eyes onto his shoes, he swayed just a little before taking a deep breath and a single step. He shook his head three or more times and stared downward, waiting for the tears to come again. The next was a young woman, well dressed and coiffed, sitting in one of the back booths of the Lyric crying silently as her salad waited for her attention. She had taken some papers out of her briefcase and laid them on the table. She wrote something on one of them and tapped her coffee cup with the pen then wrote something else near the bottom of the page. That's when the salad arrived. That's when the tears started.



.
I could be wrong about this next one. It's been cold running in the park and those could have been just watery eyes on the jogger's face, something brought about by running towards a North Wind rather than real tears. Or it could have been pain in a knee or a hamstring or some other runner's woe, but it looked like some other kind of grief to me



The morning's woman was heartbroken over something that had happened or hadn't happened. I couldn't hear anything she was saying between her sobs to her friend but the explanation was long and tortured and full of hurt. As she told the story she seemed to remember even more painful details and she wept and sobbed and tried hard to stay calm. Her friend just let her talk it all out handing her a second and then a third Kleenex. The woman crushed them into little bluish balls and dabbed the corners of her eyes with them.



They announced in mid-month that the stationary store down the street was closing. Kantor's was one of those neighborhood fixtures, one of those little places jammed packed with office supplies and paper goods, birthday cards and ink cartridges, pens of every known style and price from $1.00 to holy-cow-how-much? But they couldn't compete with the spread of Office Depots and Staples and Kinkos. They tried to hold on for a long time, but the business shrunk with each passing year. So, in the two weeks following the announcement they sold everything off at next to nothing prices - a fist-full of pens for a buck and half, reams of copy paper for two bucks, the display cabinets yours for a folded fifty. The staff was all brave and bitter at the same time, the losing side of a closely played game. I came in to say goodbye a couple of times. Shook hands with Abe, shook hands with Nathan, bought some more pens. I guess it was last Tuesday morning as I hustled from the gym to get my morning coffee that I noticed how empty the space looked behind the locked gates. There wasn't much of anything left. The counter had been moved a couple of feet from it's normal spot and on top of it there was an incredibly ugly clock, one that apparently they had not even been able to give away let alone sell. I was swept by a feeling of sadness and loss. Just a couple of tears fell, not many, just enough to make someone walking by wonder what the city was force-feeding that man in the blue tights to make him cry.

Rinsing One Spoon

Sometimes the easiest things turn into disasters, rinsing one spoon, for example, or getting on a crowded train. Both tasks seem straightforward enough, but turn the spoon to the wrong angle, try to swoop through the restraints between the cars and you could be covered in water or crushed between the subway and the tunnel wall. The latter happened at Fourteenth Street on the C line, the former I just remembered as I thought about what happened to the poor guy.

"It was an accident!," a girl was crying (his girlfriend?), "It was an accident!"

C trains are short, only eight cars, sometimes you get on one and have the whole car to yourself (that happens too often at 5:10AM and then you start praying that the next people to get on board will not be in search of someone alone in a subway car at 5:11AM) sometimes, during rush hours, they are packed door to door with commuters trying to make their local stop.

Was he trying to get to some place important? A job, a party, home? or was he showing off for some friends? That girl?

At the other end of envy

Twilight always affects me in an odd way. There is a feeling of warmth in the fading light, countered by a twinge of dread as the darkness begins to dominate. It's not just living in the city that does it. I think I have always felt this way at dusk, had this feeling of both peacefulness and anxiety at the same time. When I was a kid, throwing newspapers onto the neighborhood's porches, or when I was older, on my way to a night's music at Thee Coffe House, I had this very same bittersweet emotion, the ending of the day, the long night stretching on out ahead. I've wondered if it wasn't something instinctual, some deeply hidden, long gone from our consciousness, animal feeling, the kind that Cro-Magnon felt as he looked out from his shelter at the disappearing sunlight, or, even earlier, what the sons and daughters of Lucy thought while sitting in the protective lower branches of a tree in Olduvai Gorge.

Is that silly? Thinking that the emotions felt three million years ago are the same as the ones we feel today? Or are they the same. The others- anger,hatred, fear- don't appear to have changed all that much during more recent human history, and thankfully, neither has hope, nor pity, nor love. But did our brains get wired up so early and stay wired the same way ever since? Did the first man-ape to throw a stone at a bird delight in the same way when it fell as I do when, by some wonder combination of luck and windage, a basketball I've thrown actually drops through the hoop? There is another example of colliding emotions, the joy of hitting the basket combined with the complete feeling of surprise that the event has occurred.

It occurs to me as I am writing this that most of our emotions occur in competing doses of opposites. At the other end of envy there is a bit of love, at the distant side of love there is just a bit of disgust and hatred. What an odd brain we all carry around with us.

More on this later, it's all just mush right now.