Well. Somehow this came about to be about 20,000 words. It’s still not finished. That makes it a novella..? I’m posting this even though it isn’t finished (although it is already twenty-thousand words) because I don’t know if it will ever see the light of day otherwise. The only thing that has to be finished is the last story, which basically goes like this: I was invited to swim in the ocean by a Russian guy and a bunch of Eastern Europeans and two Mongolians, I actually took him up on the offer and we actually stripped down to our underwear and swam in the ocean together, there in November on Brighton Beach, me and a burly, tattoed, Putin-loving Russian. Before the swimming, which I don’t know if he really believed I would do, we had a few Peronis, and they told me their stories, of how they had come to the US, and what they were doing, as best as they could tell me, because they all spoke very little English, except for the Russian. He facilitated the conversation. It was a very interesting experience to say the least, a very New York experience, and is the kind of thing that happens that makes you love and miss New York City. That kind of excitement and possiblity, that anything can happen when you step out of your apartment and into the chaos and wonder-world. If this was the majority of my experiences there in the city, and if it wasn’t so god-damned expensive, well then I might have stayed. But I reread this, and I think, man, was I being harsh on NYC? Was I just weak? Did I not give it a chance? And then I reread my writing, and I remember the moments, and I think, no, it’s the truth. It’s my truth, and there you go.

This is somewhat dense and breathless, and definitely needs a major edit and some paragraph breaks, but if you can handle that, you are a true, noble reader, and I hope you enjoy reading it.

Table Of Contents

1. NYC Review
2. Dog On The Roof
3. Crazies
4. Odetari and the Hot Mom
5. The Prostitute
6. Incidents On Trains
7. Brighton Birthday Beach Party With the Eastern Europeans

NYC Review

I tried to write about New York City in general, and my experience there as a whole, but every time I tried to do this, it just made me too miserable and depressed. And, after another round of sitting down and attempting to write about yet another one of my horrible memories, I thought, If I died tomorrow, is this what I would have wanted to be writing? And the answer was absolutely no, not at all. Me writing about how bad New York City is isn’t going to make New York City any better. It’s not going to make me any happier, and conversely, it just makes me feel worse. And you don’t benefit, because with everything going on in the world today, you definitely do not need to know exactly and in great detail just how much of a hellscape cesspool nightmare New York City is. If you were really curious about that, you could just Google it. Or, for the truly adventurous and masochistic, move there. So, it seems to me that nobody benefits from me writing about the horrors of that city. Instead, I will just write for you about everything fun and interesting that happened while I was there, and we will just, as much as we can, avoid the great tragedy, and the true horror. We’re just going to get that all depression, anger, and misery, and sweep it up into a nice neat little pile, and stash it under the rug. Even though the ratio was quite abysmal, of good memories to horrific, bleak, despairing ones, it would still be a shame if they never saw the light of day, instead being drowned in a vast and crushing sea of facts related to the failings of the city, anecdotal reports of assault, battery, menacing, robbery, and shootings, and just a little murder, and an overwhelming tide of MTA-induced misery. (The most triggering acronym, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.)

If I was one of those sanitation expert people, who goes to the restaurants and evaluates them and gives them a rating, I would with no hesitation give NYC a F-, with the comment, “Wholly, thoroughly, and completely unsuitable for human life.”

New York City has a famous saying, that you might have heard. “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere!” They’re very proud of this saying. Let me tell you what this actually means. You may think, as I did when I first heard this, is that what New Yorkers mean when they say this is that New York is a tough city, fast-paced, a little rough around the edges, and scrappy, and you really have to be a go-getter, and work hard, to make your dreams come true here. It makes sense if that is your understanding of it, and that’s what I took it to mean, when I had first heard it, and when I had first moved here. However, this is an incorrect interpretation of the slogan. What the New Yorkers are trying to tell you when they say, “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere!” is this: New York City is so incredibly hostile to human life, is so rigged in oppostion to the success of any individual person, that if you somehow possess the magnitudes of resilience, resourcefulness, and luck required to not only survive, but survive without suffering significant psychological, physical, and spiritual trauma in this city, similar to if you had been in a dogfight and downed over the ocean in enemy territory, captured as a POW, made it through the camps, and somehow managed to find your way back to your motherland and were able to live a decent life again, if you could manage that, then almost certainly, you could handle just about anything. That’s what the New Yorkers are telling you, when they say, “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” But, most people can’t survive being downed in the middle of the ocean in enemy territory, and they also don’t really need to try it out anyway, to see if they can or not, and are not in any way weak or unambitious for not wanting to. In fact, they’re probably just smart, for avoiding such a horrible and potentially disastrous ordeal that may not give them any real payoff in the end, except for being able to say that they got through it alright. When New York City tells you, “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere!” this is what it means.

The New York City experience is different for everyone. The right way to go about living in New York City is to have a large amount of money, and ideally still have your company or someone else foot the bill of your housing, and live in a safe place, like West Village or Stuytown in Manhattan, and enjoy all of the finest things, and avoid as much of the horror and inconvenience as possible. That’s the right way to go about it. The wrong way is to move there with no job or skillset that guarantees you like 70k+ a year, and with no friends, and live in some random, miserable neighborhood in Brooklyn far away from everything you want to do and everywhere you’d rather be. So, my experience is obviously different from someone who say works in finance and moves into a nice company apartment on the 15th floor of a new luxury apartment building, with a gym, security guards, lots of other well-off tenants, a rooftop bar, and all the finer things that money will bring you. If you have money, like, a lot of money, you can everything you want, and if you don’t, well, have fun enjoying your life. That’s how it is in New York City. A city of peasants and lords.

The day after I escaped the city to my family home in Indiana, I walked over to the sink to get a drink of water. I looked up out of the window to see a troop of ducks crossing the frozen lake, over into our yard. About a dozen ducks, walking in single file line, in pairs of two, with bright orange feet, waddling, flip-flapping across the ice, slipping, sliding, quacking up a storm. Such a pure, wholesome, whimsical sight. It’s exactly what you want to see when you look out of your window. And, as I looked out at this procession, cracking a smile, as these goofy birds made their great journey across the ice, a thought entered my mind. “This, right here, is better than anything I ever saw in New York.” And unfortunately, it’s true. The mecca of American culture can’t hold a candle to a bunch of ducks on ice. It can if you don’t care about ducks, and more of the whimsical, pleasant, and free sights that nature brings.

You can have your fancy culture, your world-renowned orchestra, and immediately after the show, walk out of your world-renowned concert hall to see someone lying semi-unconscious on the ground, vomiting on themselves. You can enjoy schmoozing and partying with fantastic cultured people, and then walk out into the street and enjoy the spectacle of a family of rats bigger than cats playing tag on the sidewalk, darting in and out of the spokes of a wheel of a parked car, frolicking and generally having the time of their lives. (To be honest, I actually enjoyed watching this rat-frolicking, but I’m not normal. I commented to one girl as we walked back through the neighborhood from the station, after hearing a particularly loud squeak, “Was that a rat??” and she said, “It sounded like one!” To which I replied, “Ah, nature!” and she said, “Yeah.. haha..” and quickened her pace.) You can go see a show of the rising talent you’ve been fan-boying, have a stupendous time, and then on your way home enjoy a wonderful train failure that leaves you stranded in the middle of no-man’s-land Brooklyn, manage to devise your alternate route home, and then share the next train with man on drugs and completely out of his mind, violently kicking the train doors and punching the metal walls of the train, and wondering if and when he’s going to stab somebody, and what you’re going to do about it.

New York City is a city of highs and lows, a city of excess, a city of excitement, and adrenaline, randomness, filth, culture, wealth, nonsense, poverty, misery, and everything in-between. You can find any food you’ve ever wanted, and it’s almost guaranteed to be amazing. You can find anyone who shares any interest you have, no matter how minute, and can easily one-up you in your quirkiness. You can find almost every rung of the socio-economic ladder, probably on the same city block in Manhattan. I say almost because I doubt the super-rich would ever be walking those streets, would ever have any reason to descend down into the filth and chaos with the peasants, but I don’t know. It could be thrilling for them, to mingle with the common folk, and see them in their natural habitat. The different burrows all have their own charms, like the Bay Area drivers being the absolutely worst psychopathic drivers in the city, and Little Carribean being some kind of hodgepodge-African-Carribean city in the middle of New York, and the area around Brighton Beach being basically Russia, with Russian architecture, restaurants, language, markets, food, and of course, Russians, with all of the signs being in Russian instead of English. You take the train down 5 stops from Avenue H, the middle of Hasidic Jew-ville, where you see people in enormous, circular furry hats, kippahs, long, curly hair, and you are now in Russia. 3 stops north and you’re in the Carribean.

I was talking with my neighbor, after having gotten out of the city, and she made this comment. “The idea of New York City is nice.” I am in complete agreement with this statement, and it sums up my thoughts on it as well. In theory, New York City is a fantastic thing. And it has the potential to be incredible. The idea that so many different kinds of people can live in one city, together, that you can have all of these various walks of life living in harmony, all these little neighborhoods, with their own charms and flavors, is a beautiful, wonderful idea, and it is the idea of America. However, while the idea is a wonderful one, in execution, New York City is failing.

Once, at the second apartment I was living in, I saw the sun. I saw it through the window, and I thought, for a moment, “What.. is that?” Oh my god, that’s the sun! It took me a second to recognize it, because I had forgotten about it. I forgot that the sun was a thing, that exists, that you can see.

I have escaped from the city, and every day that passes, I feel much better in my soul. And actually, still writing this now, it’s been something like a month, and it is now a distant, vague, and unreal memory. Like a fever dream. I can almost forget, how horrible it was. But let me tell you, and let me tell me, before I truly forget, as I already am forgetting.. however bad you think New York City is, it’s worse than that. I’m not saying this to slam New York City, and I take no pleasure in it. Quite the opposite. I wish it wasn’t so. It’s painful for me that New York City is such a horrible mess. In many ways I loved it and loved what it was trying to be. However, right now, New York City is so bad that when you ride the trains, you are constantly bombarded with a myriad of signs that tell you not to kill yourself. “Don’t kill yourself!” Veterans, don’t kill yourselves! Depressed subway riders, don’t kill yourself! Subway surfers, don’t kill yourselves! Drug abusers, don’t kill yourselves! This is at least 6 out of every 10 signs, on every station, but especially in the worse-off areas, where the people are obviously more depressed. And possibly even worse than the signs that tell you not to end it all, are the advertisements for luxury, high-end perfumes, makeups, hotels, and vacations that 99% of people riding the train can’t afford, and the irony of which is absolutely not lost on these people. It’s a blatant taunt. The city is so bad that you can be assaulted on camera, in broad daylight, and not a thing will be done about it. People kill each over noise disputes. People are losing their sanity because of the constant, insufferable noise pollution. It gave me homicidal urges. If you think that’s excessive, read my post about the honking. You don’t know until you’ve been there. And, of course, people are dying in the streets. People dying at the airport. People dying, the slow death of poverty and despair, people with no options left, with nowhere to go, people on drugs, people in the grips of psycotic hallucinations, schizophrenic frenzies, or drug-induced madness, tweaking, dangerous, violent people, riding the train with you on your way to work, screaming about murder, riding the train with you on your way home.

Everything I’m saying here is real. It’s all very, very real. Even now I read this and it sounds like I’m making it up. I often felt that it couldn’t be real. That this just wasn’t possible. How could it be this bad? It was the same with the trains. It felt like some kind of false reality, that I was in some kind of simulation that was conspiring to play as many cruel pranks on me as possible. That this was my country, the United States of America. That this was the greatest city we have. But as horrible as it was, it was no simulation. It was unfortunately as real as real life can be.

After I had been in New York for a few months, and discussing some of things I’d been seeing and experiencing with the New Yorkers, I wondered, “What do the Europeans think of this? They must be horrified.” And just a few days later, I got my answer. I saw a comment on Reddit, in response to the question, “What is the most apocolyptic American city?” Which I thought was really telling, the fact that someone is saying, “American city”, because so many American cities are apocalyptic that we now have to have a competition to determine which one is the most apocalyptic. Apocalyptic is a strong word, but not an exaggeration. I once was unlucky enough to walk through Flatbush at midnight, having gone to the wrong station with the exact same name as the station I wanted to go to. It was like being in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I passed a woman who was speaking to herself in tongues, skinny, haunted, witch-like, and I was so.. confused.. enchanted.. I can’t find the word. I was entranced. She was just so otherworldly and strange that I forgot myself, and made the mistake of looking directly at her, which you should never do, and as I passed in the dark street, she looked back at me, with wild, inhuman eyes, and I was to the deepest depths of my soul, terrified. As I walked down the street, dimly lit, trash everywhere, trash fluttering in the wind like tumbleweeds, and the few other living beings about were other ghosts, zombies, rats, and dark, mysterious people, hoods up, moving quickly. I prayed to the almighty God that I would get home that night without being stabbed, shot, or robbed, and I was at all times ready to flee like a deer.

Dog On The Roof

When I found my first place on 180 Lenox Road, after a week of attempting to get some sleep, I noticed that among all of the din, of sirens, honking, construction, and the booming bass of a club on the corner, there was a sound that I would hear from the hours of about 8 or 9pm, to 11pm, consistently, every night. It was a dog, howling. As I rolled up to my apartment, with my two suitcases in tow, on Lenox Road, I saw in the street a woman with no shirt, and flashing her koochie. An older black woman, clearly on drugs, dancing naked in the street, saying, “I’m so young! Oh baby, I’m so young!” Some drivers honked (at this point that goes without saying), most of them just drove around her. That was right outside of the grocery store that I would frequent, a block away from my new apartment complex. The general air of things, the trash, the seediness, plus now the naked, dancing drugged-out lady, made me feel like at any moment someone was going to walk up to me with a gun, and say, “I’ll take those bags, sir.” and I wasn’t going to be able to do a thing about it. And actually, it’s very good that that didn’t happen, because if it did I would have been completely out of luck. The New York Police Department would not have taken a report, and most likely would have chastised me for my stupidity, walking around Brooklyn with luggage. What did you expect would happen? A lot of New Yorkers would agree with that sentiment. That was my new neighborhood, and when I told my two New Yorker friends about it, and expressed my concern, they were like, “That just sounds like New York!” Which, for some reason at the time comforted me, I guess because I was thinking, “Oh, so it’s just this bad everywhere.“, when I realize now is actually incredibly horrifying, because, “Oh, it’s just this bad everywhere.” However, it’s not that bad everywhere, just in most places, and I was living in one of the worst places in the city, of which there are many, but still it wouldn’t be surprising if that happened anywhere at all in the city. Welcome to the neighborhood! At the end of the street was a club, that would blare music until 2am every night. Next door was an apartment complex that was being redone, with drilling, hammering, beeping, smashing, screwing, sawing, every kind of construction verb aside from wrecking balling and dynamiting, from sun up to sun down. Outside, right down in the street, there was the honking. The honking nightmare. I already wrote about that. I thought it was just bad in this street, because the street was narrow, with cars parked permanently all along the sides, and people would come from both ways, get stuck, and honk, nonstop, at all hours of the day and night, all day long. But, alas, the honking was the same everywhere. Narrow street, wide street, empty street, it doesn’t matter. If you want to tell if someone is from New York, just have them sit in the driver’s seat of a car, and wait. They will have an uncontrollable, irresistable, and overwhelming compulsion to honk within about ten seconds. The sirens were also particularly horrible, and my neighbors in the rooms would frequently be blasting music or screaming at each other at all hours of the day and night. And on top of all of this, there was yet another sound, and it was the howling of a dog.

Every night after sunset I would hear a howling. Not just barking, but pathetic howls. This dog was clearly in distress, and every night, I would lay there, trying to sleep, listening to these howls that would keep me awake, and break my heart. One night, I had now been in this apartment for a week, I heard the dog yet again, howling away, and it was particularly horrible and pathetic that night, and so I went over to my roommate’s room, a 40 year old Iranian man, and said,

“Do you hear that?”

He replies, “Yeah.”

“It’s horrible.”

“Yeah.”

“I have to go talk to the owner. It’s just not right. Will you come with me?”

I really wanted him, not as much for company as for protection. This apartment complex was a trap house, gutted and desolate, even though all of the residents that I had met were nice, and held the door for each other, and talked. My Iranian friend was not interested. “No way, man.” So, alone I set off to find this dog and ask the owners if they would so kindly take care of their dog and not have it howl all night. I could hear that the dog was somewhere above me, so I went up a floor, to the 5th floor, but it was still above me, and so I went up to the 6th floor, and then.. I was on the top floor. Yet, the dog was still above me. Which meant that, it was not in any apartment at all. It must have been on the roof.

Walking to the end of the hallway, I discovered a stairwell leading up to a door that I presumed lead out to the roof. I went up to the door and pushed on it. It was shut tight, but the handle to the door was missing, and so, with incredible curiosty, I peered out through the hole, into darkness. I couldn’t see much, but I could tell that it was the roof, and I could hear the dog, shifting. The dog was somewhere out there, and it knew I was there, because it stopped its howling, and made no sound for some time before starting to bark at me. I searched for another way onto the roof. I went around to the other side of the building, and found an identical staircase, and this time the door was open, cracked open on the hinge.

Knowing that I would be passing through this door alone, onto a dark roof, with a mysterious dog, and having no idea what else, I was nervous. I slowly creaked open the door, took a look out, and stepped out onto the creepiest roof imaginable. It was nearly pitch dark. There were a couple chairs sitting out, a large pile of trash, and strange metal devices, the kind that you see on roofs, if you ever spend much time on them, that look like instruments you would attach to a lunar rover. The dim light from neighboring buildings were casting long and strange shadows across the roof. I felt like I was on the surface of the moon. The dog was now not making a sound, but I knew it had to be on the other side, and I stepped out of the doorway and took a few tentative steps onto the roof, scanning for any other human, that I really did not want to see, and almost definitely would have just run away from. I could see off in the distance, on the opposite side of the roof, a tower, like a spire, with a closed conical roof, and it was the apex of one of two spires that flanked the sides of the brick building that was our apartment complex. It seemed like the dog was inside of this spire.

At this point I realized that I didn’t have my glasses, and I was not about to cross this roof and go investigate the spire while being blind as a bat. I went back down to my apartment to get them, and I couldn’t resist saying to my roommate, “There’s a dog on the roof!” He still wasn’t interested. I grabbed my glasses, went back up, and this time, when I stepped out onto the roof, I saw that on the roof of the adjacent building there was now someone up there, and with his own little doggo. I thought, Now this is something, just two dudes on the roof. Truly, I was ecstatic to have his company. I struck up a conversation from across the chasm between our buildings, and I explained my situation, and asked if he had heard any barking or anything while he was up here. He said that he had, and he occasionally saw people hanging out in the chairs. One of them must have been the owner. I said that I going to go investigate the dog, and I would report back. Then, slowly, I crossed that dark roof, with all the strange metallic devices, walking slowly, creeping over to the tower where the dog was, incredibly wary of any potential human lurking around, and wondering whether the dog was freed or not. The dog was quiet now, sensing me, and I came closer, and walked around the tower until I could see into it. But it was so dark, there was only enough light for me to make out an opening in the tower, which was an open, arched doorway. I couldn’t see much, but I knew the dog must have been in there. At first it was quiet, I’m sure wondering just who and what I was, and then the dog started to growl at me, now barking, and having gotten what I came for, I ran back across the roof and to my new friend. He said, “Well?” And I said, “Yeah, there’s a dog on the roof.”

The whole business of going onto the roof, of discovering a roof, and the source of the howling, of the dog, and the creepiness, and the speaking with a stranger across roofs while looking out over the Manhattan skyline and Brooklyn, all made for an intensely strange, surreal experience. I went back to bed, and heard no more howling for the night. Waking up the next morning, I went back to the roof, still being very cautious, again expecting at any moment to run into an owner, and saw the dog in the light of day. It barked only a little, and then, it seemed that it was glad to see me, that perhaps I would save it from it’s miserable situation. I approached slowly, and what I found in the room of this spire was a beautiful, sweet pitbull mix, in a cage only slightly bigger than the dog itself, with no food or water, and nothing but trash for a bed. Whoever was “taking care” of it had been leaving it up here every night, alone, in this state. I was disgusted. This sweet dog was staring at me with doleful eyes, wagging its tail, and accepting my pets, as best as I could manage them through the prison bars. And seeing this sweet dog like this, in such a state of misery and imprisonment, absolutely broke my heart. Right then and there I wanted nothing more than to free it and take it with me. But there was just no way I could do it. I had to report it and let the professionals handle it. So, immediately I alerted the management of the building, and to their credit, they were responsive, replying that they would look into it and talk with the owner.

I spent all day thinking about this dog, wondering if anyone was going to come for it, and that night I went up to the roof and saw the dog again, and heard its pathetic crying. Then again, the next morning I went up to the roof, seeing the dog again, and contacted management, pushing them for action, asking for advice, wondering if I should call animal control, or what. They said they would handle it, and the next time I went to check on it, three days since initially discovering the dog, both the dog and the cage were gone. Only scraps of trash remained in the tower. I messaged again asking what happened, and they said they had contacted the owner, and they must have moved the dog. And sadly, this is the end of the dog on the roof story. I wished they would have taken it away, and it could have gotten to a better home. I hope that wherever you are now, roof dog, you’re having a better life.

This was still at the beginning of my stay here in New York City, and I wish I could say that it got much better from here, but unfortunately, this was just one of the first in an endless stream of sad, miserable, and heartbreaking sights and realities.

Crazies

I wrote about the painted-face lady, and knowing what I know now, I was stupid to have ever engaged with her. Not really stupid, I guess, but naive. When I showed up in New York City, I was a sweet, young lad, from the suburbs of the Midwest, and the mountains and valleys of Japan, who had been fortunate enough to have had no dealings with totally insane people, dangerous people on drugs, people who want to hurt you, scam you, rob you. I didn’t yet know that there were people who were completely out of their minds walking around the streets of New York City, riding the trains, dangerous, unpredictable people. I knew about homeless people, of course, but not all homeless people are insane or dangerous. Sometimes they’re just homeless, down on their luck, dealt a bad hand. But the homeless people of New York, many of them, are just completely insane and dangerous. They are people who belong in psych wards, with professional supervision, who should absolutely not be roaming the streets, freely traumatizing the general public, and yet for some reason, they are. I know it now, I learned real quick, but when I first moved to New York City, I had no idea. I really didn’t know a thing. And, like burning your hand on a hot pan, you learn through experience, and that I did with the painted-face lady. Then I basically knew, but what really solidified it for me, that there are people around that you simply cannot have any interaction with, and must be avoided, and that they are legitimately dangerous and can hurt you, came from an encounter on my local station, Avenue H, at my second apartment on Avenue H.

I stepped onto the train and happened to sit across from a man who was in the middle of a full blown schizophrenic/psychotic episode. I did not understand this immediately because I have never encountered anyone in the grips of psychosis. I mean, most people haven’t. Most people don’t live in New York City. He was dressed in rags, and stinking, sitting in a pile of trash bags, but that’s common. That’s nothing new. He was talking, directly to me, and referring to another passenger on the train, pointing to him, saying that he was a New York City police officer, and he (that passenger) saved his (the insane man’s) life, and I was somehow doing something wrong. I sat there, listening, trying to put this story together. At that point, in retrospect, I should have immediately marked this man as insane, and moved away from him. But I still didn’t get it yet. The man he was pointing to was obviously not involved and was ignoring everything, and as I listened to what this guy was saying to me, he became increasingly aggressive, his voice rising, until suddenly he sprang up, towering over me, and screamed, “Get the fuck off the train!” His spit flying all over me. He had reached into his pocket, as if he had some kind of weapon, and he was over 6′ tall, probably 6’2″, 230+ pounds. And then, way too late, I realized the danger, and I was out of there like a fox, immediately scampering off the train. The rest of the members of the car followed me out, some ten or fifteen people all vacated the train car with me, and I and several others went onto the next car. After stepping onto the car, I said, heart pounding and shaken up, but trying to lighten the mood, (me, the victim) “My bad, everyone!” And the woman in front of me screamed and turned around, and I said, “Sorry -” and she said, “Oh my god, I thought you were him.” So then, already feeling like an idiot for having somehow antagonized the psychopath and caused an interaction with him, I now just felt extra-really dumb, and so I now sat down and shut up. A younger woman, my age, walked by me and asked in passing, “You good?” And I said, “Yeah, I’m good. I’m great. Just another day in New York City.”

And that’s true. You’re starting to get it now, right? I’m trying to explain that, that it’s true. These incidents are commonplace. Traumatizing for me, I had never been menaced in that way before, traumatizing for the rest of the people on the train, traumazing for everyone, whenever any kind of incident like this happens, for everybody involved, and these incidents are happening all over the city, daily. For me, this happened on a Saturday. I was going to work, working that weekend, and had just had a pleasant call with a friend, getting my mood up for riding the trains on the weekend and going to work, instead of staying at home and recovering, and trying to tell myself that it was going to be a good weekend, and I was going to do good work, and obviously, that completely 180ed me and put me in the hole, and after the long trek to Manhattan, walking across the city, past all of the panhandlers, who were being particularly aggressive, I think because it was Thanksgiving weekend and they knew there were tourists and visitors about, after forcing them off of me, as they were being especially tenacious, like the one guy who latched onto me, repeating, “Come on man, you seem like such a positive person. What’s wrong?” And I thought, Do you just say that to everybody, or do you really think that I look like a positive person? Because you’re right, you AirHead-selling-jackass, I am a positive person. I am a radiant lightning-ball of joy, and the problem is that I live in the most degraded, backwards, miserable place on Earth, and have just been reminded of it, again, after I had with much effort tried to tell myself otherwise, told myself that everything would be okay, and you need to leave me alone right now, because I don’t have even a single ounce, not a scrap of any time or energy left for you today, Mr. Panhandler. Soon after, I walked in to Anime NYC, with my precious VIP pass, joined the horde of weeaboos dressed up like anime characters, posing, snapping photos, complimenting each other, and generally having the time of their lives, and by comparison, it made me feel all the more miserable. There was no place I would’ve like to have been less, then, and after giving it a go and attempting to enjoy it and do my job, I threw in the towel and went home.

Of course, by the end of my NYC life, I was an expert at recognizing dangerous situations, and dangerous people, and learning how to deal with them, but sometimes there’s nothing you can do. For example, on one of my last nights in the city, I was riding back from Manhattan, and onto the train steps a dangerous person, and I knew right away that he was trouble. He exhibited the classic signs, the scanning, frantically looking around the car, jittering, leg bouncing furiously, nervously, sitting with legs spread wide, ready for action. He was tweaking, for lack of a better word. I don’t know what it is, if it’s drugs, and what drug, or purely mental illness, but he was dangerous. He had the potential to be dangerous.

There were five of us in that train car, myself included, and of course the less people that there are, the higher are the chances that you will be a victim. There was a young couple in the middle of the car, a girl my age on her phone, sitting across from me, and a man in his later 30’s on the other end of the train, reading a book. I was the only one standing, and I was watching, and the couple was watching. The girl and the book-reader were none the wiser. I watched this guy, out of the corner of my eye, and through the reflection in the glass, but discreetly, as you never want to look directly at them. I watched him, discreetly, watched as he bounced, then as he stood up, began pacing. He paced, back and forth, multiple times in front of the couple, then over to the book reader, then back over to me, now walking right behind me, where I couldn’t see him at all, and after his small bout of pacing, he decided the time was ripe to start kicking.

Now, I just want to remind you that we are trapped with this guy. The doors have closed, the train is in motion. Until the next station, you have nowhere else to go. It’s us, and it’s him. He decided then that it was time to start kicking, and so he began to kick the closed train doors. With his huge, heavy boots, he pulled his leg all the way back, both hands firmly gripping the metal poles of the seats, and he kicked. Big, heavy boot kicks. The kind of kicks that you would use to bring a door down. Phone girl is paying attention now, she glances over, the couple still watching, carrying on their conversation nervously, and as for the reader, he was desperately pretending not to notice. After six or seven kicks, our lunatic gets bored, and comes up with a new idea. Now, he wants to punch. He started walking again, and as he walked, up and down the aisle, he randomly punched the walls of the train car. I don’t know how he didn’t break his hand. He walked right over to the book reader, and punched the wall next to him. And it was at this point that I wanted nothing more than to get the fuck off this train. However, I also wanted to go home. At the next stop, I decided that if this psycho didn’t get off the train, I would. But, until we arrived at the next station, we were stuck with this guy, and I had to start seriously considering what I would do if he tried to assault me or one of the other passengers. And, what if he pulled a weapon? What kind of weapon? Knife, gun? On me? On the couple? On the reader? What would I do?

These are the things that I thought about, these are the thoughts that are in my brain, as I rode the train home from meeting an old friend that I hadn’t seen for a long time, having a good time over beers. This was the end, the flourishing touch of a wonderful night spent in New York City. At the next stop, this dangerous man walked up to the open doors, and he stood there, and looked around, insanely, and he really made me take a guess, because I had to decide if he was getting off or not before the doors closed. I really didn’t want to get off, and thank God, right before the doors closed, he stepped off, and we all breathed a sigh of relief. And yes, just another day in New York City.

The same week as the door-kicker guy, I think it was actually just the next day, on the way back from work, riding a packed Q train from the after-work commute, there was a man shouting. I could hear him shouting, screaming, all the way from the other end of the car. It was a packed train, so I wasn’t worried about myself, but I could hear from his ranting that he was psychotic. He was not in reality. His behavior was similar to the man who threatened me before, and yelled at me to get off the train. This guy was shouting, at the top of his lungs, over and over, something about “shooting a motherfucking n**** in the head”. At the next stop, half of the people on the train got off, and one woman moved to the other end of the car where I was, and sat down next to me. I said to her, “What’s going on with that guy?” And she said, “I don’t know.” And I said, “He sounds angry. Is he on the phone?” She said, “No, I think he’s just.. you know.” Yeah, I know. I replied, “Well, he sounds dangerous. He actually sounds insane. I really hope he doesn’t try anything.” And she said, “You know, just leave him alone, he’ll be alright.” We continued talking, then, and she said usually if you just leave them alone they’ll be alright, and that she sees things like this all the time, as most New Yorkers do, and you can recognize a true New Yorker because while someone is screaming about murdering someone else, and kicking doors, and pissing on the floor, a true New Yorker sits there the entire time on their phone and never looks up. What an incredible thing. I think it’s partly a survival mechanism, because it’s true that you absolutely cannot engage, and it can cost you your life, as it did for one rider, two weeks ago as of me writing this, who tried to intervene in a fight between two other riders over loud music (noise!), and was shot and killed. You simply can’t engage, because these people are too far gone. So you sit there and look down, look at your phone, look out of the window, and pray to God that you get home safe. She told me that she was from Africa, and had lived in the city since 2008, and that things have always been bad, but have gotten much worse since Covid.

New York has done this to itself, by the way, from what I have read, because they put almost no money into mental health services, closed all of their psych wards, and did not do anything in response to this. So, they basically have no plan and are doing nothing useful or serious about their serious mental health problem. Somehow they seem to be not doing anything about anything that is fundamental and important to the success of a city, such as having working public transportation, which people have no other alternatives but to use, and generally having people be safe.

The woman I was sitting next to on this train ride with the screaming, murderous psychopath then proceeded to tell me a story about how on her bus ride that morning, there was a man also shouting about murder, and nobody on the bus said anything. And I can tell you, this poor woman, as like so many of the New Yorkers, did not look like she was thriving. No, like so many of these train riders, she looked beaten down and exhuasted, like she had been through the ringer. And is it hard to see why? No. Imagine, that on your bus ride to work in the morning, someone is shouting, ranting about murder, and in the same day, on your train ride home, someone else is doing the same thing. And that’s nothing out of the ordinary. Just another day, in New York City.

Odetari and the Hot Mom

There was one artist that I really wanted to see. This is Odetari. I found a place called Baby’s All Right, in Brooklyn, and they had concerts every night. Two shows, every night. That’s pretty amazing. And they weren’t just rinky-dink acts. They were pretty damn good artists, with decent followings, songs with millions of plays on the streaming services, and they were coming from around the world. The first show I saw there was a band called Jitwam, I got free tickets to the show through a company that sent you free tickets to things for $5 a month, which was cool until I just didn’t want to go do anything anymore, at least not take a gamble on events, because it reached the point where I had so little energy and patience left, and every single excursion out into the Hellscape of NYC was so taxing and strenuous, that I really couldn’t afford to have any failures in my excursions. They absolutely had to be a success. That meant big-time stuff, like genius pianists and orchestra events at Carnegie Hall, and seeing old friends. But in the beginning, I made it out to Baby’s a few times, and saw Jitwam, who were way more amazing than I ever would have expected, having a full band and with all members being absolutely GOATED at their instruments, and then another group called.. I can’t even remember, but they were from London, and did some crazy stuff on the synths, that was very electronic.. and then, the last event, Odetari. It was his second show ever, if what I could gather from the internet was true. And I have to give you a little background on Odetari so you can understand how important this was for me.

First of all, I came to NYC for the culture, and this was exactly what I was looking for when I came here. Odetari was only playing two shows, one in LA, and one in New York City, in Brooklyn, 30 minutes from where I was at the time. If artists are going to go anywhere, the chances are good that they will at least go to NYC. If speakers are going to go anywhere, if anyone is going to go anywhere, to promote their thing, chances are good that they will be coming to NYC, and that is one of the great sources of power of the city. When I first visited, my friend had just commented that some of my photography reminded him of Yayoi Kusama, “my boi thinks he Yayoi Kusama” was his exact comment on my Instagram. I thought, “I wonder if I can see any Yayoi Kusama while I’m here in the city”, and I looked her up, and lo and behold, there was a Yayoi Kusama exhibit at the David Zwirner going on at the exact time that I was there. Yayoi Kusama is internationally recognized and famous. She is a big deal. And just like that, I could go and see her work, in person, on a whim. That is the power of the New York City. The culture game is real. And so, I was following Odetari, one of a few new artists that I had really gotten into, and he posted on his Instagram that he was going to have two concerts, and one of them was at Baby’s All Right, and I was like, wow, hell f***in yeah. I bought two tickets immediately. This was a big deal for me because I have never been in a big city, and had never been able to just go to shows like I could then. Unfortunately, NYC is a horrible nightmare, and so I couldn’t enjoy just going to shows on the weekends for long, but I got a taste of it, and it’s amazing. If you are a music lover, to be able to just get on a bus, on any night you want to, and go see talented musicians actually perform, in the flesh, see the artists who are making all this great music, it’s an incredible thing. And, it’s totally inspiring. To see them doing it. I have never been able to do that, and I hadn’t seen a lot of live music, and so this was one of the first times I was able to go see an artist that I was really into at the time. I would say before this, I was able to see Jack U perform at Spring Awakening, a music festival in Chicago when I was in college, but it was still big stage EDM thing, which is fun, but not really an intimate experience that you have when you go to an artist’s exclusive concert. I could hardly see Skrillex or Diplo at that concert. But Baby’s All Right is not a big venue, it could fit maybe 200 people in the room, probably not even that. 100-150. So you were right there, up close and personal with your artist.

I bought the Odetari tickets a month or a little over a month away from the show, and I had a mission, to convince at least one other person to go to this show with me, and share the love of this great new talent, and despite telling and inviting everyone I knew and barely knew, my best friends, my roommates, my new acquaintances and co-workers, I could not get a single person to attend that concert with me. To be honest, that was really for the best. Nobody was going to be able to match my level of fandom, and I could fully immerse myself and act autonomously alone. It could be a completely personal experience for me, treating myself. It was a really important thing for me, and if I did bring anybody and they weren’t as into it as I was, it may end up tarnishing it, although I still would rather have brought someone else, because I like to involve people. I’m just a social guy, you know. But anyways, that night rolls around, Odetari night, and it was not great timing. At that particular time, which was I think November 6th, I was less than a week out from leaving the current place I was subleting at, and leaving it in a hurry, because it was completely unliveable, and I still had no place to go, because the real estate company I was working with on a new apartment was, I was learning, a complete sham, and run by loser scammers, and so not only was that not going to work out, but I was going to have to fight to get some money back, because I had paid a “good faith deposit” (there is no more irony in any other name of anything ever) to secure my place in the apartment and have it taken off the market, so they said.. I was running a sleep deficit because it was impossible to sleep at the apartment, I was depressed because NYC is depressing, and I was stressed about being homeless or spending days in AirBnBs, which would cost probably 150-200 dollars a night, or sleeping on the couch in my office building, because I learned that they were open 24 hours a day, every day.. I was really going through it, by the time Odetari came around. But this was the entire reason why I was here, and I was going. I was shutting out all of the chaos of life, and I was getting what I wanted, now.

It was a Thursday, and I took the train over to Baby’s All Right after work. I was early, and had some time to kill, so I went to a nearby bar, and I was really debating that, because I didn’t want to spend money, and I didn’t want to drink too much, and I might have, because I often drink too much when I’m depressed. I walked back and forth past a decent-looking spot a few times, and just decided to go for it. It was a clean, stylish place, not too fancy, and only a few people in there. It was still happy hour, so I got a, I think Narragansett, which had been my go to, because it’s the cheapest thing you can possibly order at a bar in New York City, sometimes as little as $5, for this light beer. And it’s not bad. I got one of these, the bartender was friendly, just chillin’, wearing a flannel. I feel like any bartender that’s wearing a flannel is gonna be pretty chill. I don’t think you really wear a flannel and aren’t chill, unless you’re wearing one of those flat-cap baseball hats with it, and then you might be a douchebag. Just maybe. But this guy, he was just chillin’, hooked me up with the beer, we made some small talk, and then a huge group, looking like a company party came in and gave him something to do.

I went over and sat in the comfiest couch in the place, over in the corner, and drank my beer, and thought about life. At that time, I was thinking about where I would live, within the city, but I was also thinking about how the f*** to get out of New York City, if I really should, or if I should try and stick it out, if it was going to get any better here. I couldn’t see how it would get any better, but I hadn’t totally given up on it yet. I was agitated, and energetic, and with all of these thoughts rolling around in my mind, I couldn’t sit still, and I started pacing, as I do. I am a pacer, notoriously, and many people have commented on my pacing. I can’t help it. It’s something I do, when I’m really worked up. And here again, I started pacing in the bar, which was really quite a big establishment, so I had plenty of space to myself for pacing, and I was really just drinking my Narragansett and pacing, pacing, until a girl came up to me, and she said, “Hey, are you okay? You should join my friend and I for a drink. You look like you’re really going through it.” And I said, ok, and sat down with them. Two girls, my age, mid-late 20’s. And I said, “Man, it’s really that obvious, huh.”

I really don’t hide my emotions well. Sometimes I’m an open book. I guess it was the pacing, and I was probably sighing a lot too, I don’t know. They said yes, it was obvious, and they asked me about life, and we talked, and had a little therapy session right there. The one girl had recently quit her job, as in walked out two days ago, her manager having disrespected her for the last time, so she said, and the other girl had just interviewed for a new job, fashion designer, that she really wanted, and then there was me, who was just not in the position I imagined I would be in, in my New York adventure. They took opposite stances, regarding whether I should just give up on New York City, or stick it out and see if it could get any better, with the one girl saying I should just get out if I really didn’t like it, and the other girl saying I was just a quitter, but she was really only being a devil’s advocate. I kind of wondered that too, I thought about that a lot, if I was just quitting on something too early, just giving up when things got difficult, and then some more things happened and I was able to say with 10000% certainty that New York City is just the worst place on Earth and it was never going to get better for me. And, we kept talking, and had some laughs, and then I checked my watch, and it was Oderari time, and I had to go. We hugged, I said thanks, they wished me good luck, and out I went. I had a date with Baby’s.

New York City is a horribly mismanaged cesspool nightmare, but the people are alright. I had plenty of positive, fun, serendipitous interactions with the New Yorkers, and I wish I really didn’t have to leave. There was always someone around to share in your outrage with, always someone around to lend a hand. That’s why, I think it’s a real shame that the city is so terrible, and the government is so useless and ineffective, because it’s a real let down for the good people of the city. They don’t deserve to live in such a shithole, they shouldn’t have to. It’s a god damn shame.

I crossed the street, got in line, and in I went. I didn’t even notice the security guy. He was standing in the corner, dressed in all black, his sneak level 100. He could have hit me with an arrow and I would have been a dead man. He said, “Hey, ID.” I showed him, then went to the next gal, scanning the tickets, and I could hear the lady in front of me talking. She was a Hispanic woman in her 40’s at least, and I had the feeling this was someone’s mom, saying something about could she buy a ticket, she needed another ticket for her husband. And I thought to myself, This is perfect. If you remember, I had bought an extra ticket and tried my utmost to find anybody to bring to this Odetari experience with, and had failed. And I said to this woman, “Hey, I have an extra ticket. Do you want it?” And she was like, “Oh really? Yes, but let me call my husband.” I said, “Ok, let me know if you need it.” And scanned mine.

At any other Baby’s All Right concert, I might have wondered what so many parents were doing there, but with Odetari I already knew how it was going to be. Odetari had launched a Discord server, and I had joined up, and they did an age poll. There were several thousand fans in the Discord, and that’s where I learned that 80% of Odetari’s fans are under 16 years old. I wasn’t surprised. I found Odetari on SoundCloud, but I’d be willing to bet that about 98% of his fans came from TikTok, where he was making videos of Sonic The Hedgehog saying stupid shit and with his music in the background. I didn’t think about kids dragging their parents along with them to Odetari, but I also wasn’t surprised, because I saw multiple kids ask in the Discord in response to the concert announcement if under 18 was allowed in, and if they needed a guardian, which was pretty hilarious. So I was looking forward to seeing the youngins show out for Odetari. And I was hanging out in the lobby, still a little early for the show, and then the Hispanic mom found me and said, “My husband is here, can I have your ticket?” And she tried to pay me for it, and I said no way, I’m just happy that someone got to use it.

After that I went in the back, and picked out my spot. I was down on the right side, not all the way in the back, somewhere in the middle-back, with the wall to my right, so I could lean like a true American (apparently we like to lean), and have some space. I had a perfect view of everything: of the stage, the DJ booth, the rest of the concertgoers, of which the average age was probably 17. It was a good mix though, not just kids, but some parents, and then some adults in the 20’s like me, the parents and older crowd all in the back, teens up front. Before Odetari there was a DJ, no performance, which is not that hype, as DJs just can’t do much with what they’ve got, but he did a good job. Basically every song he played was gas, a certified banger, from Lady Gaga to Crystal Castles and Lil Uzi Vert. He was just going through the hits, but hey, that works. And occasionally shouting into the mic, “Who’s ready for Odetari????” He went on for too long, I think an hour, but I tell you what, at the end of that hour we were ready for Odetari. And then, the anime visuals came on, some scenes from Kimetsu no Yaiba (Demon Slayer), and it was go time.

Odetari came out swinging, with the bangers, dressed in a giant fur coat, black knit cap, gleaming grills on his teeth, starting off right with a hit. Crowd goes crazy. It was really great to see. And for having little concert experience, Odetari was a pro. Authentic, energetic, relaxed, and you could tell he was happy to be there. The fans knew all the words, to Odetari songs I hadn’t even heard, and it was fun to see which ones were really the fan favorites, and what the favorite parts of the songs were. The Baby’s audio engineer also got his shit in order for this concert, because the last one I had been to, the bass was just way too much, and for this concert the audio was perfect. So, everyone was vibing, Odetari performing like a champ, having a great time, and then, probably 2/3 of the way into the concert, this woman comes down and takes the space in front of me. She’s looking into the crowd, looking for someone, I’m kind of watching her, interested, and then she turns to me, smiling, and says, “I’m looking for my daughter!” I laughed internally, because you know, it’s a pretty hilarious thing to be saying at a concert, while noticing that this mom is extremely hot. This is an extremely hot mom. I said, smiling back, “She’s definitely in there having a great time!” This hot mom looked again into the crowd, and then seemed reassured, and turned her attention to the concert. Before long, she’s throwing her hands up, dancing in front of me, and generally being sexy. She’s kind of looking my way, you know, and I’m thinking, Is this hot mom making moves on me? I’m still watching Odetari, but now I’m watching her too, and she’s moving around, vibing, and then after one particularly wild flail of her arms, says to me, “Oh my god, did I hit you??” (She really didn’t even come close.) And I said, “No, no.” And she said, smiling, “Oh, ok!” Then she keeps dancing. She’s having a good time, dancing here in front of me, and then she comes up with another reason to talk to me, I can’t remember what it is was this time, and then I said whatever, and then I went to scratch the corner of my eye, just a casual swipe, and she seemed to think that was her fault, and she says, again flashing her perfect smile at me, “Oh, I’m sorry, did I spit on you??” And my genius response to this was, “No, but you can spit on me anytime.” (Sometimes, my brain just comes up with something so brilliant that even I can’t believe it.) And without breaking eye contact, immediately she replies, “I would love to spit on you.”

So, here we were. It was now confirmed, this incredibly hot mom was in fact into me, and not only into me, but she was so into me that she was ready to spit on me, if only my heart desired it. For a minute, I forgot all about Odetari, in his big fur coat, and the screaming fans, except one of them, who was the daughter of this hot mom, and I was thinking. Now, what, do we do here? I just came here for Odetari, I was not here for love, and then, the universe bestows an incredibly hot mom upon me. But with my current state of affairs, being so run through the ringer by the city, my sole focus on Odetari and the concert, and with a daughter in mix, I imagined me standing around with hot mom and her daughter, not even sure who’s age I was closer to, and the potential awkwardness of that scenario… And I’m sorry to say I just wasn’t up for it. After I told this story to a few friends, they all asked, “Did you at least get her number?” Nope, I didn’t even get that. I didn’t even think to ask, actually. I forgot that was a thing. She kept dancing in front of me, the concert ended soon after, and then she went off to find her daughter, and I was out of there.

That was the end of me and that hot mom, but really, just having a such a beautiful woman tell me that she “would love to spit on me”, that alone was a great treat, the whole concert being amazing on top of it. I had a feeling if I stuck around I would have met Odetari, which the videos posting in the Discord after the show confirmed, but I was happy enough, and my night still wasn’t over. I had to make my return journey, which is the most difficult step of all, as the city generally does not want you to ever have a good time on the trains, and conspires to make it as difficult for you as possible, always. I was going to take a new route home, and had prepared it beforehand, looking at the maps, memorizing the stops. I left Baby’s, had gotten to my first station, boarded the correct train going the right way, and then after two stops, the train stopped, and the conductor announces, “Okay, everybody off!” And kicked everybody off the train, at a random stop in no-man’s-land, and I along with about three hundred other people at this station now tried to figure out what the hell we were going to do. Being randomly kicked off a train at a random station is a problem for everybody, but it’s particularly annoying for me because I don’t have a smartphone, and so have to navigate the old-fashioned way, via inconveniently placed metro train maps and conversations with angry and unhelpful MTA employees. This happens once, it happens twice, it happens thrice, and all in the same day, and you really stop having any patience for it, and stop wanting to do anything ever. But for Odetari, I could handle anything the NYC subways could have cooked up for me, barr seeing someone get shot or stabbed, or shot or stabbed myself. That would not have been worth it. It took me at least an extra hour to get home that night, but I didn’t care.

The city likes to punish you for having fun. New York City is a masochistic city, for masochists. Some of my worst train nightmares coincided with some of what were supposed to be my most fun outings. For example, all North-South trains that I could have possibly needed went down after my attending a concert with the “Mic Jagger of Japan” (Yoshiki) at Carnegie Hall, because someone got hit on the tracks, and it took me at least two more hours to get home that night. Another time, I had to take “replacement bus” (I avoided these like the plague from hereon afterwards) because the Q line was down for the weekend while I was trying to go to Carnegie Hall for a concert, (wow, and that was actually the exact same day that I went to see Yoshiki), and Jesus Christ, it took an hour on that bus to go what would have been two stops on the Q, because of traffic. Getting screwed one way is bad enough, but most of the time New York City is not content with that, and will f*** you on both legs of your journey, especially if you are attempting to do something fun. New York City just loves f***ing it’s citizens in the ass as much as humanly possible. A city for masochists, no doubt.

The Prostitute

This is not really a fair name for the story, because the main character of this story was not, in fact, a prostitute. However, she did look like one, and she even commented on this herself, which made it all the more amazing, as I gradually discovered that this lady I was speaking to, on a sunny bench in a small park area between apartment complexes, was not only not a prostitute, but was totally super-smart, and extremely well-read. Near my first apartment on 180 Lenox Road, I had discovered a little spot that was great for just sitting and being outside, and enjoying the outside air. These spots are rare, at least rare enough in Flatbush, and this was a good little spot I found, only a five minute walk from my apartment. There was enough space between the buildings that the sun could actually come through, and for most of the day, earlier in the day it would hit two of the benches in this little plaza. There were three benches across from the two that basked in the sun, but they were shaded, covered by some trees, and usually they were taken. I only sat on the sunny benches, and I didn’t come here many times, because this was before shit really hit the fan, and my New York life took a complete and amazing nosedive, engine blown, propellor off, windshield shattered, turbines in flames, but most of the times I came here to this sunny bench I had some kind of interaction.

It is a great thing about New York, one of my favorite things about it, is that if you are looking for some action, you can always get it. You can always get something. The number of characters is too great for you to go out in the city and not find anyone to talk to, anything interesting to come away with. I was standing on a corner in Flatbush, on Church Ave, inspecting a strange architectural marvel I had just discovered, which was something like a modern building being built around the shell of some ancient one, and as I stood there, trying to understand what was going on here, a man saw that I was interested, and came over and started telling me all about it. He was middle aged, had terrible teeth, a large scar on his chest, his arm was in a sling, and to top it all off he had little to no hair on his head. Basically, he looked like he had been having a rough time. But this guy, he told me all about the construction, that they were upgrading the outside of the building while keeping the frame, and I commented on the other interesting architecture in the neighborhood, as there were a number of large sandstone/granite churches that looked like they were straight out of Europe, like mini-castles, and other interesting buildings, and he knew all about them. I mentioned that I was new to the area, and he told me about some cool architecture in the city that I could go check out. He gave me an entire itinerary and had me feeling like going off on a great adventure right there and then to go see some of these sights, but I had a bum leg and couldn’t do much walking those days. We talked for about twenty minutes I’d say, before shaking hands and saying goodbye. Those are the kinds of quality interactions you can have in New York City, and they aren’t hard to find. It’s that kind of place, where rubbing shoulders is unavoidable, interacting with strangers is normal. It’s one of the things that I liked the most about NYC. Me personally, I’m trying to have quirky and fun interactions with strangers basically 100% of the time. And I did think that New Yorkers were mostly friendly, or at the very least helpful, and often times quite chatty. They could also be mean, scary, and totally insane. At least it’s not hard to tell who’s who.

There was one morning where I got onto my Q train, for the morning commute, and it was pretty packed. I was still groggy from waking up, and took one of the only seats left open, that was in the back corner. The seats form an L, there are just a ton of L configurations of seats on the train, with three seats along the wall, and two seats turned towards those three seats, perpendicular to the wall. The corner seat that I sat in this morning is the seat in the bottom-left corner of the L, and it is the most undesirable seat. You have to squeeze between people to get there, and you have the least space to yourself out of any possible seat. I guess though, once you get into that seat, if you plan to be sitting for awhile, it’s a great seat, because you are furthest removed from the rest of the people on the train. You’re kind of tucked away. You just have to get there. It is often left open, even on a packed train, but I had an hour ahead of me, and anyways it doesn’t make sense to leave seats open when there are so many people fighting for space, so I was going to sit.

Because I was groggy, I was lax, and didn’t really do a check of the people I would be sitting by, scanning them for danger signals. Big mistake. I squeezed into this corner seat, and plopped down. Immediately after that, the guy sitting to my right turned his head, not only 90 degrees, but like a full 130. He was leaning forward, with his arms on his knees, and he turned his head that far back, at least 130 degress, to look me right in the eyes, and stare me down for a full ten seconds. He was extremely displeased that I had the audacity to take this corner seat, and he was going to let me know. And this guy, I looked him in the eyes. He was wearing a red bandana, and had a black facemask on. He was Hispanic, probably in his 30’s, and he looked like a crazy-eyed killa. I was absolutely terrified. I looked away immediately, and he kept staring at me, for about 10 seconds, I swear to god. And I sat there, praying that he would not stab me, praying to God, that my mistake would be overlooked, that I could be forgiven for accidentally taking this seat, and at the next stop I swore I would move. I just needed to make it one stop without getting stabbed. But to my great relief, at the next stop he got up and got off the train. That was one of the more terrifying New Yorkers.

The first time I went and sat on one of these sunny benches, within two minutes of sitting down, a guy came over to me. He was a younger guy, around my age, wearing a red NBA tank top. He started chatting me up, asking me for the time, and then just a few sentences into the conversation I was thinking, Okay, so you’re just a little bit kooky aren’t you? I wish I could remember our full conversation better, because the whole thing was a wild ride, but the best part I do remember. He said, “You know Chris Brown? That’s my cousin.” And I was like, “What, really? Wow!” A little bit later in our conversation, and he says, “Yeah man. You know T-Pain? That’s my cousin.” And now I’m thinking, wow, really? Chris Brown and T-Pain are related? I wouldn’t have thought that, but I guess they’re both musicians, and – “Yup, and you know Jay Z? Yeah, that’s my cousin right there.” And now I was starting to think, you know, this man really has an incredible number of very famous musician cousins. I would be lying if I didn’t say that I getting a little dubious, but of course I didn’t say anything. Really, it was definitely more fun if these facts were true, than if they weren’t.. And anyways, aren’t we all cousins? Distantly removed. Then he told me that he had a show coming up at the Barclay’s Center on Atlantic Avenue, and that had me saying, “Really??” to which he replied, “Yeah.. I’m just the opening act though.” We talked for a little bit more, and I remember him saying, “I just thank god every day for being here, and keep thanking god. Every day is a gift. It’s a blessing to be alive.” Amen, brother. And then, he bade me adieu, walked off. A kooky guy, a character 100%, but he had good energy, and a lot of famous cousins. Nothing wrong with that guy.

Next time I went to the benches, a few days later, and I wondered if I would be seeing my friend with all the famous cousins again. He wasn’t around, but when I walked up to the little plaza, I spied an interesting-looking woman sitting on one of the benches, my favorite bench. There were three seats on the bench, and she was all the way on the right. Her shirt was pulled down, quite far down, showing a lot of skin, tan, dark skin, soaking up all of the sunlight, like she was at the beach. She was older, at least late 50’s, 60’s, (I hope she wasn’t in her 40’s looking like that, and if you are reading this, nice bench lady, and you are in your 40’s, I’m so sorry), and for being older, she was really done up, in a gaudy kind of way, with thick eyelashes and mascara, large earrings, long, purple plastic nails. You know what I mean. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but, for showing all of the skin, looking a little rough due to the age, and then the layer of glam on top of it, just her general vibe, was giving me prostitute vibes, but of course I didn’t know that she was one, and I wasn’t going to say that she was one. I felt a lot better when, at the end of conversation, she commented on it herself.

The truth, we will never know, but I can tell you that I sat down next to this lady, and same as with the guy with all the famous cousins, within minutes she was talking to me. I think I’m just really approachable, I don’t know what it is. People like to talk to me. If you also sit down by someone on a park bench, I think it’s completely normal and fair game to start talking to them. But she said, waking up from her snooze, “Excuse me, do you know what the date is today?” And I actually did know it, somehow, because that’s one of those typically irrelevant facts like how the weather is going to be, that I’m just okay with living out, and not knowing, but today I knew it. And so our conversation was off to a great start. It’s been too long now, this was months ago, so I can’t rememeber all of it, but I remember that we were first talking about what a great spot this was, and how you could actually soak up some sunshine, and then we talked about how we had both just moved into the neighborhood, and what we thought about it. She made many, many good jokes about the sirens, all of the sirens and the sirening happening. She was living behind me, in the building behind mine, which was an enormous new development that towered over the rest of the sad little classic brownstone apartment buildings that the typical Flatbusher lives in. Her building had reminded me of a tower in an Xbox 360 game I played in high school, called Fable 3, where the main evil villian was a magical wizard guy, and started building his magical wizard palace out in the middle of the ocean, and it was called The Spire, and throughout the game it just gets taller and taller, and you can always see it in the background, rising. At the end of the game you go through The Spire and get to the top and kick his ass. I never finished the game though, too long. Her building was like 50 stories tall, which is 40 stories taller than any of the other brownstones around, and was also extremely shiny and new, and it lorded over everything like The Spire. I used her building as a reference for when I was trying to find my way back to the apartment in that Flatbush maze.

So I found out she lived in that building, which she confirmed was in fact very nice, and had a pool on the roof, which she said she would usually use, but sometimes she couldn’t get in, I can’t remember why. They were just closed sometimes. We were both like, what, that’s dumb. So here she was at the bench. And I’m just thinking now, this is really how it goes in New York City. We are neighbors, she lives right next to me, and in my apartment, dogs on the roof, cockroaches on my toothbrush, mold, mice, and lead paint, noise, drugs in the hallways, the heat doesn’t come on until December 15th, and right next door, this lady living in paradise, nice new building that I hope has no cockroaches but you never know in this city (I saw one in our fancy Broadway office building bathroom, on the 15th floor), the drugs are probably higher-end, and she has a pool on the roof. Probably has a gym as well. Living very different lives. You will see a neighborhood of mansions right next to a block of brownstone apartment buildings, and they can be the same area, and the one neighborhood of mansions probably has 30-50 people in it, in luxury, although they live in New York City so their rich-person experience is still tarnished (but you know what? It could be enhanced, if they enjoy lording over the peasantry), and then in the same area of brownstone apartments, maybe 400-500 people. My building had 6 floors and something like 12 apartments on each floor, so if we say that there were on average 2 people per room, although I bet there were more, more like 2.5-3 people per room, you would have 144 people in the building, occupying the same physical space as 2 or 3 mansions. So, yeah. That’s a big difference. And you would walk out of your shitty brownstone and into a street of mega-mansions. Honestly though, I think that’s kind of nice, because you can at least have a nice street with nice houses to walk down, and imagine you live in one, and if you are in the mansion, you can look out of your window and see the people eeking out a meager living in their tiny brownstone apartments and thank god you’re not one of them.

Anyways, this lady was living in that giant building, and we were talking about the building, and I commented that there were always sirens going on right around there, and I even saw some action at the building when I walked past it a week ago. Some firefighter trucks had pulled up, the firefighters poured out, then an ambulance arrived, and they went around back and put someone in a stretcher. I watched a bit of this, I had nothing better to do, you know how it is. And she said that the first floor was a hospital, or a nursing facility, and there was always action going on.

Anyways, as we chatted, I came to realize that this prostitute-looking woman was not only not really a down-on-her-luck-type individual, but she was very smart, and well-educated. She was completely defying her looks, and I was utterly shocked, when for some reason I mentioned that I had recently been reading a George Orwell novel, and I said, “You know George Orwell?” And she said, “Of course.” Making me feel ashamed for even asking her! And I said it was one I had never heard of, Burmese Days, and she actually knew about it, and had read it, and could recollect some of the story. Now, people, do you know about Burmese Days? Have you even heard of this book, let alone read it? Maybe so. I’ll tell you that I only knew about it because my roommate had it in his book collection, and he hadn’t read it. If you don’t know about it, it was Orwell’s first novel, inspired by his time working for the British government in Burma. I had never heard of it, and I’m not a librarian, but I do know a lot of books, and if I had to guess, probably 1/10000 people have heard of it. Maybe I’m totally wrong here, but I don’t think that’s a book that most people know, let alone have read, and yet here we were, me and this mystery woman, discussing the plot, and the characters, of this rare George Orwell novel. And as we talked, in the back of my mind, I was thinking, “Well this is kind of crazy isn’t it? This is not at all how I expected this interaction to go.”

And that’s how it is, here. You just never know who you’re going to be talking to, in this city. This is another one of the things I really liked about New York City. You can bet that whoever you’re talking to, the chances are high that they’re going to have some interesting things to say. I had been eyeing the book that she had with her, it was a thick one, and after talking about Burmese Days I asked what she was reading, and you know what it was? Carl Jung. Yeah, that’s where she was at. Then my surprise was complete. And not only was she reading Jung, “one of his later works”, but she knew a lot about him and his philosophy, and seemed to be a big fan, except she was disappointed he was a misogynist. Ah, well, nobody’s perfect!

Incidents On Trains

I had many incidents on trains. Much of my New York life was spent on trains, so naturally I would have many stories from them. I already told you a few of them, such as the bandana black mask terrifying Hispanic guy who stared me down when I sat next to him, and all of the crazies, punching the walls and screaming about murder, but that’s really only the tip of the iceberg. I have many, many more. I had an hour commute one-way, to my office in downtown Manhattan, and then because the trains are almost always down or delayed, it would really come out to be an hour and fifteen minutes on average, and then I had to take trains and buses to go anywhere ever, because I was living in the no-man’s-land of Flatbush, and then south Flatbush, so.. I became quite familiar with the New York City public transportation system. Which is, for sure, the worst public transportation system out of any city on Earth, if we measure that by how many people are inconvenienced, traumatized, injured, killed, and add up the total human suffering and time-wasting. It can’t even be a close contest. New York is thoroughly trouncing all possible competition. It’s something they are doing quite well. And sometimes, the things that are happening, you think, this must be some kind of joke. Someone must be doing this to get a sick-kick, because there’s no way that this could otherwise be the reality of it. It just can’t be.

For example, one morning, I hopped onto the Q train, my beloved, and began the great nightmare journey to work, and after two stops, the train was down. Delayed, the conductor announces, for reason unknown. Across from us, at the platform, a B train rolls up. The B train runs the same route, but skips a few stops, and everyone has told me that the B train is faster, and you should take it instead of the Q if you can, but I’ve ridden it many times, and can say that there is no difference at all between their arrival times, and so it doesn’t matter. The conductor comments on this, saying the B train is available, and most people on this semi-packed train do the natural thing, and cross the platform, and get onto the B train. I watch them load themselves on, and now the B train is nearly full to the brim, and I thought, “Yeah, I’m just going to wait..” But, I also had the feeling that if our Q train was delayed for unknown reasons, the B train might not be doing any better. And that feeling turned out to be correct, because for the next 10 minutes, both trains now just sat at the station, and you could see that everyone who had crossed over to the B train, was just extra-pissed off now, because they were crammed in, and standing. But, eventually, the B train did take off, and then another one rolled right up, and so I figured I would be stupid not to make the move now, and so I and everyone else who had stayed on the Q, crossed the platform and got on this B train. Then, after we had all sat down, the conductor announced this: “I’m sorry, everybody, but you’re going to want to give yourselves a liiitle more time (he really drew out the i in the little) in the mornings for the next month and a half, because we’re doing construction in Central Park. Thank you for your patience!” And everyone collectively groaned, and that’s where it again entered my mind, I’m almost laughing to myself now, that it feels like a joke. It’s a cruel joke, that someone is playing on you. It just doesn’t seem like it could be real life. Now, if you know the New York City subway, you know that everything he just said is completely meaningless, because they are always doing construction everywhere, all the time, and everyone is already factoring in delays and train downages, because they happen everywhere, all the time. It’s a fact of daily life. So, this doesn’t really mean anything to anyone. It just means that our B train, the one we’ve all just decided to get on, is also going to be further delayed, and we’re going to be even later to work, or wherever it is that we’re all going at 8:30 on a Tuesday morning.

Some people get out their phones and make the calls, which I have now heard a hundred times, and always go like this, “Yeap, sorry, stuck on the train, gonna’ be late!” Sometimes with a little laugh, sometimes with agony and exasperation. This B train continued to sit there, now, and the Q train that we had all abandoned then took off. Another Q pulled up, and I made the move again, because, why not? At this point, I have nothing to lose, and the more times I can switch trains on this platform, the more fun it is for me. I had already told my boss that I was late. Now I could play Frogger as much as I wanted. Luckily though, because really I can only spend so much time on those trains without completely losing my will to live, that Q train was the winner, and we were able to go several more stops now, before our train goes down because of a “signal delay.” It seemed to me that “signal delay” was just a catch-all, get-out-of-jail-free card to stop the train, like saying your “stomach hurts” when you’re trying to get out of going to school. “I’m sick, my stomach hurts!” “We’re stopping, ‘signal delay!'” Conductor wants to stop and eat a snack? Signal delay. Rat hit the windshield, can’t see? Signal delay. People on the train actually about to get to where they are trying to go, on time? Signal delay. Generally I was okay with a signal delay being the reason for the train stopping, because it meant about a five minute shutdown. What you don’t want to hear is “Someone got hit” (“Again???” A true reaction from a New York City subway rider.), and you don’t want to hear nothing. If they don’t give any reason at all, it’s very sus, and you should expect the worst.

The trains lurch. It’s the best word to describe their stopping and starting. It is extremely lurching, and random. You cannot predict how strong or aggressive any individual lurch will be when the train stops or starts. It’s kind of fun that way, but it prevents you from ever relaxing, unless you’re seating, or vigorously clutching something. It’s very rare that you see someone who can just stand there, and not hold onto anything, and still not desperately grab for the nearest pole, rail, or wall when the train slams on the breaks, or lurches off to a start. I had the utmost respect for anyone who could ride that train without holding onto anything, ever. Sometimes people would think they could, and then they would be sent flying, smashing into other riders, apologizing embarrassingly, or saying nothing at all, and just eating the embarrassment, then finding the nearest thing to hold onto and gripping it tightly. For my hundreds and hundreds of hours on those trains, I could never get the hang of the lurching. It would trick you, too, because the train would glide into a station, as smooth as butter, perhaps for a few stations it would do this, lulling you into a false sense of security, and you would relax, until the next one, where the train would suddenly come to grinding, screeching halt, and then you would be sent flying.

There was one time where I was beginning my commute home from work, and had gotten onto the Q train at 52nd, like usual, and there was an open seat between two girls. I was eyeing the seat, but I opted to stand, because I had been sitting all day, and I usually let other people sit if I can, and I didn’t want to squeeze in between these girls anyway, but the train sat in the station for longer, and longer, and I was still eyeing the seat. I thought, let me just get my seat now then, and as soon as I made the move to sit in this seat, the exact moment that I started crouching down to land my buttox in that plastic chair, the conductor decided to slam on the gas. I was sent flying into the girl to my right, and ended up sitting right on top of her. And she went, “Oh!!!” I immediately jumped off of her and into the seat, apologizing profusely. And I just thought, it’s like they fucking planned it, and I said that to her. “It really feels like they’re trying to do this to you, doesn’t it?” And she laughed. She said, “They have a camera. They were waiting for you to try and sit down.” And we had a nice, wholesome laugh about that. This interaction was much better than when, another time, the train took off like the Cedar Point Dragster, and although I was holding onto a rail above me, my left foot was in the thinnest puddle of water, and when I tried to plant my feet I ended up spinning nearly 360 degrees in half a second. This happened on a completely packed train, during the morning commute. I felt totally embarrassed by my wild random spin, but to relieve me of some of my embarrassment, I had what I thought was a pretty witty comment, and said, “Wow, just like a ballerina!” You really don’t see a move like that every day. It was impressive. But the morning commute is a rough crowd, and not a single of the ten people in my immediate vicinity had any reaction to my spin move, or my witty comment, or really just my existence at all. They wanted nothing to do with it. There was one girl, sitting next to me, who when I spun, without looking up went “Oh..!” with a little start.

Once, on the Q train home from the office, I boarded at 52nd like usual. It was a good crowd on the train, not packed but pretty full, with the seats mostly taken and a good number of people standing, and I had to wait a few stops to get a seat. I really wanted a seat, because I had some reading material that I was keen to crack open, and that was a copy of The New York Times. A physical, paper copy. I had swiped it from the office, and it looked like a really juicy edition, and I had never read the physical New York Times before. The last time I had a copy of an actual paper newspaper at all I can’t even remember. So, that was going to help alleviate my boredom on the ride home, and give me something to do. I ended up scoring a seat that stuck out into the center of the car, the bottom right of the L of seats, and that was a good enough one because I at least had no one sitting to my right. I sat down in this seat, reached into my bag, and pulled out the Times. I placed it on my lap, and started to unfold it, and then something magical started happening. As I began unfolding this behemoth of a paper, it started to grow, opening up, and continued to grow, and then it just didn’t stop, but it kept unfurling, and becoming larger, and now was starting to fall apart, because there were like, newspapers inside of newspapers, papers tucked inside of papers, and suddenly, very quickly things were spiraling out of control. Do you guys actually know how big a physical newspaper is? One copy of The New York Times is like an entire book. It would probably take ten hours to read it front to back. I had no idea it was going to be anything like this.

As I was sitting there, wrestling with it, trying to keep all of the papers together, and get to what I wanted to read, on page A15, my left elbow flared out, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw the woman sitting next to me recoil a bit. I turned to her and said, “Ah, sorry.” And she didn’t say anything. And I knew it was my mistake, although I was having a little bit of fun with this, and you are not supposed to have fun on the trains. I understand that I was being a jackass, I got that. I didn’t almost hit her in the face, nothing close to that, but I still got too close, and I was making a fuss and a lot of noise. That gigantic paper was crinkling and rustling like it was paid to do it. She didn’t reply, and I said to her, and to myself, “Sorry, I’ve never really read one of these before. I didn’t realize it was so big!” And she sighs, loudly, and reaches up under her knit cap, and takes out an earbud. She had had headphones in, but I couldn’t tell because of the cap, and then she says, loudly, and with obvious annoyance, “What?” I realized now how it was all going wrong, and I said, “Oh man, nevermind, I’m sorry-” But she cut me off. “No, you said something to me. What did you say?” She wasn’t going to let me go. She had taken out her headphones, and now she was going to hear whatever this jackass newspaper-reader guy had to say. I said, “I’m sorry for disturbing you, I just had never read one of these things before, I didn’t realize it was so big.” And she said, “Okay, well you don’t have to read it right next to me. You can turn away from me.” With that, she put her earbud back in, and left me to my own. Chastized and shamed, I turned as far away from her as physically possible, and continued my struggle with the paper from a respectable distance.

Some people on the trains really didn’t like me. Some people did. I talked with quite a few cuties. There was one girl, I think this was also at the 52nd Street station, but it might have been Union Square, and I noticed her on the platform. She was young, very pretty, and had striking orange hair. She was just generally an interesting gal, and I was standing right by her, waiting for the train, when she said to me, “Excuse me, but do you know if this train is going to Brooklyn?” And I was like, “Oh, hello!” I told her it was, and we got on the train together, and started making conversation. Turns out we were both new to the city, and both musicians, and she was here for some singing program at a university that sounded like something I probably should have heard of, and she said she was working with a producer making some “electronic pop music with orchestras.” I asked her where she was coming from, I think she had hinted that she was not from the US, and I was having a hard time guessing her accent, because it was subtle. She told me, “Israel.” And suddenly, after saying this, she looked around the train car, getting quiet, and laughed nervously, and said, “I shouldn’t be saying that so loudly.” This was just a week or two after the Hamas-Israel conflict broke out, and she was right for thinking that. I reassured her, and didn’t think she had too much to worry about, but later I thought about it, and she really was smart for wanting to keep a low profile. I got her Instagram and told her I looked forward to hearing some of her music, and I saw that she followed me, but I didn’t follow her back right away. The next time I was on Instagram, I tried to look her up but she wasn’t still following me, and I couldn’t find her anymore. For whatever reason she must have unfollowed me. Shame! If there’s ever a super-cute orange-haired Israeli girl that gets big making orchestral electro-pop, I can say I met her on the Q train in New York City.

Another time, riding the Q, (I was almost always riding the Q), I was coming back from the JFK airport, and had thankfully very few nightmare incidents, which was fair, because my trip to JFK was so full of them (it was actually the most harrowing and horrible journey of my life to date), and this return journey had consisted only of helping a couple French girls get on the right train, I was only a few stations from the stop for my second apartment in south Flatbush, Avenue H, and I had pulled out my phone. Just absentmindedly checking my messages, I think, and when I did that, and was sitting there, I heard, “Hey.” I looked up, and there was a cute girl with frizzy brown hair sitting across from me, on a mostly empty train. I said, “Hi.” She said, “You don’t have a smartphone?” And I said, “Nope.” And finally, it had only taken months, but it worked. I was finally getting some positive attention from a girl because of my super-cool flipping phone. She said, “That’s cool. Why?” Yes, frizzy hair cutie, it is cool. I’m a cool guy. (I actually said that. “‘Cause I’m a cool guy.” Man, so cool.) And then I tried to explain to her in a very brief window of time, why I had given up on the smartphone life, and to answer her basic question of, “What’s it like?” I could spend more than just a few minutes answering that question, but as it’s become so normal to me now, I don’t have all of my thoughts on it prepared and ready to go, like I used to. I just told her, “It’s nice. You should try it.” And then just like that, my stop had arrived, and I said, “Do you want my number?” And she said, “Oh no, that’s alright.” Which I thought was hilarious, but I was also already walking out of the door. It wasn’t good timing. This is how I’m justifying her denial of wanting my number, anyway.

I have gotten a lot of attention regarding my no-phone life, and now flip phone life, from the other youngins of my generation, once they realize that I’m not just messing with them, and that I actually don’t have a phone. Because, it’s so uncommon to be in your 20’s and not have a cellular device, or to have a flip phone. You are such a magical unicorn, I found out, that nobody actually believes you when you first tell them that you don’t have one. They say something like, “Just scan this QR code.” or, “Can you just look this up in Maps?” and you say, “No, sorry. I can’t. I don’t have a phone.” And they say, “Right, haha.” And you say, “No, really. I don’t have one at all.” And then they say, “Wait.. what the f***?” I was doing business at the town hall in Hokkaido, after I had moved there, I was doing some business somewhere, and they said, after I handed back my form with no phone number written down, “Anata no denwa bango wa nandesuka?” (“What’s your phone number?”) And I said, “Sumimasen. Denwa bango wa naidesu…” (“Sorry, I don’t have a phone number…”) And she definitely looked at me like I was lying my ass off. She was like, “What? Why are you lying to me about this?” Oh, I just remembered. It was in Ozu, at the doctor’s office. She just kept looking at me like, “Why are you lying? Why would anyone lie about that?”

I was interested and looked up phone ownership rates in the US, and basically, not having a phone made me a statistical anomaly, which I was thrilled to be, as from the age range of like 20-29, 0% of Americans did not have a phone. Contrary to what Scrumpillion Wombus told his mom though, I wasn’t doing this to be cool, or because I thought I was “better than everyone else.” I just did it because I wanted to know what it was like, and then it turned out that I liked not having a phone. The flip phone is a great compromise though, and my life is better with it than without it. The smartphone I now have that I use whenever I have wifi, that’s okay. It’s good for making Instagram reels. But I could get rid of it any time.

This didn’t happen on a train, but just because we’re talking about girls..

There was one girl I remember, I met her when I went to Le Pain Quotidian, a little bakery/cafe Panera Bread type thing, to pick up my cheap meal. I had been introduced to an app called whatever (I can’t remember), where you would find places that were getting rid of excess inventory, meals generally, but there were some grocery stores that would give away produce and whatnot, and I had some fun with that. I introduced this app to Mr. Six Corners (my extremely entertaining supervisor at Japan Foundation and my NYC best friend) and within a week he had used it five times. I only used it a few times before I couldn’t afford the time or energy for it anymore, and one spot I had success with was a Le Pain Quotidian near the office. The first time I had used this app, I went to the restaurant, and was hanging out, after confirming that they had wifi, because I had a smartphone that I was using the app on, but no data for the phone, and I needed to wifi to present the QR code that would only appear at the right time, so I couldn’t screenshot it beforehand (what a pain in the ass).. anyways, I had all that confirmed, and left, walked around and killed some time, and then came back and was hanging around the store. There were two other people in there hanging around as well, a guy who looked very Spanish, and this girl in a pretty yellow leather jacket. I said, “You guys here to pick up your packages?” (I can’t remember what they called it in the app.) And they were like, hell yeah. We did some chatting, the guy at the counter announced that we were ready to get our goody bags, and we got ’em, and then I was still talking to the girl in the yellow jacket on the way out, told her to have a good night. She was gorgeous, brown hair, nice smile, tall, and had that vibrant yellow jacket, the same color as kids’ yellow rainboots. That’s a color that you don’t see every day. Anybody who wears a color like that is probably a bright ray of sunshine, or trying to be. And she had these amazing boots on too. But why I really remember her, and she’s making it into this blog at all, is because when we said goodbye, she turned around, I happened to see that she had one of the greatest cabooses I’ve ever seen. It hit me hard, like, BAM. I can easily say that it was in the top 5 cabooses I have ever had the pleasure of seeing on a woman, and the moment I saw that caboose, I wanted to run after her right then and there and ask her for her number. But she was already descending into the subway, boots gone, then the caboose, finally the yellow jacket, and I just that beautiful buttox go. Someday I might really regret letting all of these chances slip away. But at least I have a great memory of her in her in that yellow jacket, and her phenomenal caboose.

Brighton Birthday Beach Party With the Eastern Europeans

Lord, this is a story right here.

It was the day of my birthday. That is to say, it was my birthday, on this day. I had only just moved in with my new roommates, after a frantic and exasperating search for a new apartment, that I desperately needed because 180 Lenox Road was such a nightmare. It was so loud that I was unable to sleep at night, and it was also crazy expensive, even if it would have been nice, but doubly worse for how absolutely terrible it was, and so there was simply no way that I was ever going to stay there for another month, even though my roommate was pissed at me for leaving, because he was strapped for cash, and knew he wouldn’t be able to find another soul to take the place, and help him pay the rent that he was already, I suspected, extremely behind on. Unsurprisingly this resulted in me having to fight tooth and nail to get my security deposit back from him, but thank God in the end I did, even though it came three months late, and in two separate installments. He had 100% spent my security deposit immediately on rent that he owed, I knew. I not only managed to escape this untenable situation with my full deposit returned to me, and without having to go to court, and also, surviving a difficult mess with a shady, scummy real estate company that I had fallen in with, as they were complete and utterly shameless, well-versed tricksters, who were wasting my time, and energy, and had $500 of my “good-faith deposit” (god, what a name), with many terms and conditions that were so designed to ensure that I would never get it back, but guess what, I DID, get it back.. anyways, I waded through all of this nightmare, sleep-deprived, and expecting fully to spend some nights sneaking into my Japan Foundation Manhattan office and sleeping on the floor, because, what, am I going to pay $200 a night for an AirBnB? Absolutely not. I was fully prepared for this, when out of the great sky, a miracle fell onto me, only several days before I planned to vacate 180 Lenox Road, plan or no plan. This miracle was contrived by the greatest man in New York City, who I had mentioned in the last story, Mr. Six Corners, who I expect to give his own entire chapter in this saga, but let me say here that he saved my ass so bad that I actually owe him one million dollars. If I ever have an inordinately extravagant amount of money, Mr. Six Corners, you get one million dollars. I’ll say it now. (You see that I have left myself a nice out, by not defining the exact amount of money that I would have to reach before I pay him one million dollars. At least Mr. Six Corners, I will pay for your flight ticket to America to come visit me any time, and a splendid penthouse for you to stay in, with your four cats.) This incredible man hooked me up with some roommates that he had stayed with when he first came to NYC, fine gentlemen, of whom one was a JET in Kumamoto of all places, just like me. We had an immediate bond over this, which is the power of the JET program, and Kumamoto, the greatest place on Earth. (The more I see of the world, the more I feel that that is absolutely the truth.) When I arrived at that new apartment building, from the outside looking relatively the same as the 180 Lenox Road apartment, a typical brownstone, but then I walked in. I walked in through the scanning security door that was actually functioning, into a lobby that had a fireplace (albeit fake), and fine art, tile, marble, and was clean, and saw that people felt comfortable enough to actually leave packages in the lobby, displaying that they could possibly trust each other enough to do that, and then my roommates showed me the new apartment, with nice furniture, decorations, and all of things that make a home a home, and in that moment I wanted to cry. And they showed to my own room, a room that was furnished, beautiful, comfy, warm, quiet. I really wanted to cry.

I slept that night for 14 hours straight. And when I woke up the next day, I told them, Mark and Casey, that today was my birthday, and they said, “What????” And so we went to a Russian restaurant in the neighborhood, and it was without a doubt the best restaurant I went to while I was in New York, possibly one of the best I’ve ever been to in my life. It was literally some of the best food I have ever had, and it was also on my birthday, and I was still in shock after escaping 180 Lenox Road Hell, and that I had teleported into such different and fortunate circumstances. I had a fried fish, the best, most incredible fried fish I had ever had in my life (I know I keep saying this, it’s true), with the most amazing sides, a cooked cinnamon apple, a broccoli salad, some pasta dish, I can’t even remember it all, and then desert, cherry blintzes, and the beer, my god, the beer!! It was some sour, apple tasting beer, and everything I put in my mouth that night was perfection. It was all incredible, it was a feast fit for the highest nobility and loftiest royalty, it was 10/10, and I left a worthy review on Google, telling them so. And, to make it even better, not only was it the best food I had ever had, and the best food in New York, but it was also one of the cheapest places I’d been to. It was completely reasonable. And Mr. Six Corners came to join us for that feast, and so it was Mark and Casey, that he had stayed with before, Mr. Six Corners and I. Probably, this is in the top 3 meals of my life. It will be very hard to beat what must be first place, where I ate a chicken head in Macau at a Dim Sum dinner, in front of my American study abroad group, Chinese, Macau students, and various international professors. That was an incredible dinner and will be a tough one to beat. But anyway, before our magnificent birthday feast, I had some time to kill in the day, and it was a beautiful sunny day, November the 11th. It was a good day for exploring, so I decided to take the train down south just a few stops to Brighton Beach to see the ocean.

It’s kind of a crazy thing that you can easily forget, that New York City is right on the ocean. You wonder why the air smells so fresh, and why there are seagulls around, and then you remember, oh yeah, the ocean is somewhere around here. You don’t see it, unless you fly, or take a boat further out along the river, or go to the peripherals, like to Coney Island and Brighton Beach. But you could actually live in New York City, and live on the ocean, which still is an amazing thing for me to say.

I took the train down south to Brighton Beach..