TheBunnyBlog.com - February 13, 2007
Further New Yorkian Observations
I heart New York. Really. This place is so fuckin' super I don't even mind parroting back Milton Glaser ad campaign lingo--and considering my dream job has forever been photoshopping phony advertisements for these people--that's some serious love.
[My sister's birthday is "National Buy-Nothing Day. That shit cracks me up.]
You can cry on the streets. No shit. You can just burst into tears--which I've done a lot as of late, because I'm pretty sure I'm having a baby nervous breakdown--and no one judges you at all. In fact, nobody even notices! So many people walk around crying it doesn't matter. It doesn't shock anyone. I even found myself a little crying comrade in a pink coat and red leather boots at 1st and 1st who was bawling while I passed her equally as bawling though not nearly as hot. I turned and she turned and we shared a mutual crying moment that was special, but soon quashed by my desire to tear her clothes off and fuck her in the street. Anyway, that was totally nice.
I've discovered the beauty of custom saladry. There are these all-the-rage delis here featuring subpar and soggy sandwiches not even a panini press can salvage, with a fully-stocked custom salad bar, behind which a congenial man in a white apron sits with tongs. You pick your lettuce choice: mesculun (not that mescaline--boy wouldn't that be a fantastic deli!), spinach, baby spinach or romaine, and then Mr. Tongs makes a pass through the custom toppin's section of the bar. Call out your toppin's/dressing choice, and whoosh, your custom salad goes into a big metal bowl, where it is well-tossed and then packed into an ergonomic plastic container you can take home with you. And that's the important part, the take home bowl, because the salad is monstrous--a three-meal salad--and for $8.95, it's a steal! Beat that Wegmans!
[My only issue with this is that Mr. Tongs usually doesn't speak English, and thusly fucks up your toppin's choices. Now I'm not picky about my toppin's, surprise me. It's all groovy. But when I ask for scallions and you give me a bowl full of asparagus, that fucks up tomorrow morning's shower-pee pleasure. We all know what asparagus pee smells like, and I've got a roommate. If he smells the asparagus pee, I'm screwed. No more shower pee pleasure for the duration of my stay in wonderful New York City].
Now I know what you're saying, "Bunny come on. Be real. You don't wear shoes like that." Motherfucker, I wear heels! Sometimes...occasionally. Okay, so my pendulum has swung Lesbianic--in light of recent events it'll stay there for a great while--and right now I'm more interested in seeing them than wearing them. On not-snowy, not-windy winter days, this is the Soho shoe of choice, and I go there to write, but really to catch these creatures in their natural environment, maybe toss some balled up bread bits at them and see if I can't get one to come home with me. They just make legs...so...wow.
[Aside: I've been having this recurring nightmare that I have a super-hot, high-maintenance girlfriend who I can't buy enough jewelry to keep. I buy and buy until I have no more money, and then she calls me a loser and dumps me. If this is what its like to be a guy, I'm sorry. I feel for you.]
Wegman's. I missed you. People not from upstate New York will need this Wegman's word elucidated. I guess you could say that Wegman's is a grocery store, because that's the brush they paint themselves with--and its true they sell groceries and grocery-like sundries there--but Wegman's the concept is really much bigger than that. It's a feeling, a heartbeat. It is an orangey epicenter, a hub where community bonding is not the foregone American concept we think it is. It's a place where the front-porch chat is still going strong. It is warmth and artistic signagery, hot dishes and cold, yin and yang, an all-welcoming place where one can buy 79 cent Goya beans or delicate little $500-a-pound French truffles, and--no matter the tally--one's cashier will still smile with a genuineness that comes from having health insurance, a 401k and a fair manager. And the greeter is generally retarded, which I think we can all agree is awesome.
[What's the deal with New York grocery stores? An entire aisle is dedicated to the canned bean, but no soap? I'm confused, and running out of soap. Am I going to have to go into one of those Duane Reade thingies? Drug stores befuddle me. I get lost, confused.]
It is winter, and the news is all about my people--my poor, poor people. A few days prior I wrote till 7am, and it was the morning after a big upstate storm. I was tired as shit and about to go to bed when the pretty newscaster on the telly--pretty in a Noreaster newcasterish way, as opposed to LA newscasterish, which is slutty and orange--said, "Residents of Oswego County were hit with eleven feet of snow over the weekend..." Their programming swapped to shots of Oswegoans on their roofs, hacking away at six feet of accumulated, heavy-ass, lake-effect flakeage, and seeing this brought all kinds of memories back to me, for I was born in Oswego and lived my first eight years in a nearby suburb. Back in the days before global warming and El Nino--when storming was a weekly occurrence beginning in October and ending in April--the snow would cover the door, and my sister and I would fight over who had to hold the trash bag open so daddy could shovel some snow in and make a hole for his body to fit in so that he could shovel out. The sooner he cracked an escape hole, the sooner we could play in it all, and the one who didn't get stuck with trash bag duty got a head start on suiting up. I had a nice moment there, remembering the snow-playing and how I preferred peeing in my snowsuit to going inside and losing precious snow-fort building time.
But then I remembered the asparagus and the moment was gone.
Posted by The Bunny at 9:58 PM