As a New Yorker did you ever silently decide that there was no reasoning with any Homo sapiens within your ken or geographical comfort zone? That is, did you ever reckon that you did not have the shoe leather or the psychic energy to channel your inner Diogenes and start trekking in search of that honest or at least intelligent and considerate man or woman? You DID decide that you would not bludgeon or garrote the next insensitive lout who either blocked your driveway, used your unlocked garbage pail to place his rubbish (indifferent to and usually wrong about the correct recyclable receptacle of yours to cram with his trash), or eschewed his pooper scooper in favor of allowing his beloved Fido to express himself with canine artistry in the form of steaming, brown minarets of most unfortunately placed (along your sidewalk and directly in front of your front door) organic waste. But you DID reserve the right to fantasize the righting of these wrongs (and banish insomnia, in a way more effective than counting sheep or draining a warm glass of milk), by machine gunning as you drift off (in the best 1929 Chicago traditions of wielders of the then latest in "chopper" firepower) all of the above mentioned bozos who routinely send the quality of life, in particular: your life….into the toilet (where, in my utopia, even canines would unfailingly park their poop).
"It's NATURAL!" So goes the modern cry of purveyors of all kinds of foodstuffs in the 21st century. The word has been appropriated by many and applied more and more with only a positive connotation (something like the nineteenth century love affair with literary genres that extolled the virtues of the "noble savage") to numerous objects and behaviors that only yesterday were deemed rude, inappropriate, tasteless, brutish, ugly and most importantly: demonstrative of incredibly thinly veiled contempt for one's fellow man. Well, yes, the sentiments of nearly unvarnished animosity are mutual, but this blogger's views of some (not all) of his fellow pilgrims are wholly justified by their boorish acts (as well as sins of omission) witnessed every day. The psychological truism that correctly asserts that people behave toward you pretty much as you behave toward them is only a useful blueprint for coping if certain fundamental, shared values are there and are ever likely to blossom with the slightest prod in the form of decency or turning of the other cheek (in the real world where I live, in the form of picking up other's trash, or tolerating someone's running of a red light: "Gee, I guess he needs to express himself creatively or destructively…and, oh, let me walk around and pick up the thousands of bits of refuse tossed by others each and every day that magically blow into my front garden along with cigarette butts deliberately tossed there since my postage stamp plot of greenery is clearly viewed as one big convenient soil-filled ashtray. Gee, I'm glad to oblige and make life a bit more convenient for my unfortunate neighbors bitten by the litterbug."). No, this form of cheek turning is both useless and the H.O.V. lane of the superhighway to downtown Masochism, as the anonymity of life in New York renders any selfless deeds in the service of sanitation and beauty, acts of supreme indifference to the transient pedestrian, worker enroute to his job, hygienically challenged neighbor or certainly any vagrant enroute to his next handout or bottle of Sneaky Pete.
So, what to do? Spitting is no fun. To avoid the double standard of behaving like one's tormentors, one must expectorate into one's handkerchief. Boy, this "civilization thing" is hard work! (Note to all the reprobates out there: begin by at least learning this fact.) Stewing could lead to boiling over. Surely, we don't want any Vesuvius-like outbursts. Poilcemen and E.M.S. workers with straight jackets at the ready will not empathize with my stories about the years of provocations. Brewing (a cup of coffee) may prove helpful, but then again, insomnia and hyperactivity may result as one broods while turning over and over in one's brain, all the kaleidoscopic instances of slights and "arrows of outrageous fortune." At such a point the mowing down of the barbarians with a phantom AK-47 will not suffice to bring tranquility or an embrace by the sweet arms of Morpheus. One is left sitting. If hemorhhoids are non-existent or a distant memory, this may work for a while, provided that one has a good book or a well developed regimen of meditation and a good pair of ear plugs. Noise pollution in the Wormy Big Apple is another subject for another blog entry, but it is worthy of another round of bellyaching. Don't sit too long and certainly don't watch too much television. Mr. Newt Minnow, may have had a particularly nerdy moniker, but it had nothing to do with the accuracy and continuing, immutable truth about his famous remark about the boob tube: it was (and remains more so than ever), a "vast wasteland." Just channel surfing the literally hundreds of choices on my cable set each evening proves this fact over and over again. Talent and creativity in America is becoming as shriveled and atrophied as the muscularity of our morals. And regarding that honesty issue: there's nothing LESS real than an exceedingly contrived "reality" show (shades of that Bolshevik/Majority Big Lie, and for that matter, the "99%" claim of the cretins of the Occupy Wall Street crowd). By process of elimination, my survival strategy has emerged: a bracing single fresh cup of java in the a.m. after a good night's sleep, brief viewing of the weather channel on the t.v. in order to confirm the availability of a clement day and thus a promising walk toward the remaining strip of greenbelt in my neighborhood, with ear plugs in place, clothespin on my proboscis, and a blinder for each eye as I place a hand on the shoulder of a Rent-A-Diogenes who has the stomach for the journey. His fee will include a fresh pair of New Balance sneakers for me, more a prayerful pun about "a contemplation devoutly to be wished", i.e., a renewed America (not so out of whack in so many ways), than comfortable footwear to aid the spiritual quest. It will be the blind leading the blind, but that inner vision of truth must be relied upon to get out of this funk along with a faith and trust along the lines of that parlor game of my young adulthood whereby one relaxed and fell backward, trusting to the loving arms of one's fellow partygoers. Wait, I've no health insurance.
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