"Just Trying to Help"

I rarely give anyone, advice. The reason is obvious, I have never been on the cover of Common Sense magazine.  I’m the guy that sunk my money in a hamburger stand in downtown New Delhi, India. Who knew that in India the cow was sacred?  However, when I see the chance and the need to help my readers by passing along some hard earned wisdom I feel I should. In that spirit and based on this last year living in  New York City, a city that teaches hard lessons daily here are my

“Ten Things to Stay Away From”

     

           Stay away from people that describe their life as “My Journey” or “My Personal Journey” (the redundant version). These are people so taken with themselves that they believe one day their life-story will become a TV documentary.

   

             Stay away from people that tell you, “I don't want any drama”, “Please, no drama” or my favorite 

       “I'm tired of all the drama”. No they're not! First of all these people live for drama, they are drama; no one can out do them for drama. The one thing that is constant in their life is all their drama. If you have to know a person like this just prepare yourself for Act III of Shakespeare’s “King Lear” a lot.

             Stay away from people that cut you off in the middle of your thought/sentence with: “right, right, right, yeah, yeah, yeah” It’s become an epidemic in New York. Can I please finish my sentence or my thought before you let me know you already know everything I know?  I’m going to try this, saying “ You know, the flux capacitor during ion recalibration, often emits a non-aural stream of negative grignon particles and if the person does the “right, right, right, yeah, yeah, yeah,  I'm going to ask them to explain to me what I just said.

              Stay away from any company that sells their product or services in “bundles”. When and where did this annoying, cloying, stupid idea come from? The word bundle had all but disappeared from the English language until some geeky Berkeley MBA grad came up with the idea. Hey Time Warner…….wanna see my "bundle"?

  

             Stay away from any company or product that promises you “happiness”. I saw a car commercial for Manhattan VW yesterday and their catch phrase is “we sell you happiness”. Oh really Freud? The finest philosophers and scholars in the world haven't been able to identify what happiness is, or what makes people happy. So, I guess all the finest minds in the world, Nietzsche, Foucault, Hobbs, James, Heidegger, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Oprah and Tony Robbins should just step aside, the answer to that elusive, great question has been discovered by Manhattan Volkswagen.

    

             Stay away from anyone that asks you for “Just a minute of your time”. The first thing they've done is lie to you. How reliable can they be?  

  

             Stay away from anyone over the age of 50 that still go by the names of: Skippy, Precious, or Willow. They are adolescents that think they are cute but they are just creepy, weird. They mistakenly thought that if they stayed cute, quirky, and a child they would stay young. Now they have become like the characters Dustin Hoffman & Barbara Streisand played in “Meet the Folkers II”.

   

       Stay away from any politician that says, “We just want what’s best for the American people”. If that were true they would have resigned already so we could get someone less grasping and self-serving in there.

              Stay away from anyone that offers you something for free. The last time someone was truly offered something for free, Eve took a bite out of it and I think we all know how that turned out!!

      

        Stay away from anyone that wears suspenders, especially anyone with suspenders and a bow tie(self-explanatory).

"Soft Spots on a Big Apple"

A few months back I wrote about some of the denizens of my new world, New York City. If you missed that posting I have the link to it at the bottom. I think you will find some humor in that one too.  Since then, I have run into many more "characters" but here are 3 of the most exotic.

The Barking Man:  I have seen him several times on my walk to Hunter College. He frequents the area around 73^rd between Third and Lexington avenues.  I see him walking his dog (terrier of some type) up and down a couple of the residential streets. He is a tall man, in his thirties (I guess) and except for what he is doing, he would not be especially noticeable. In fact, I only noticed him because I heard him. When he is walking his dog, his dog walks obediently beside him and doesn't make a sound. However, as they walk, the man does the barking. He barks for his dog. Every few steps he lets out a couple of loud woofs. Not the bass woof of a big woolly dog, or the shrieking yip of a rug staining yapper. No his is a mid-sized bark all right. All the way down to 2^{nd Avenue} and back again the barking man barks for his dog. I have watched in fascination but I wouldn't dare approach him, what if he does other things for his dog too?

The Debt Collector: This smallish woman is a lot like most of the other lost souls in New York City, that sit on a busy sidewalk corner holding out a cup seeking your money. She sits in front of the busy Starbucks on 75th and 1^st.  Business must be good, she only works five days a week. Like all the street cup holder’s she has the typical teeth optional, sad face, scrawny, pretzel body and it’s pretty easy to see she’s not a former Rhodes Scholar fallen on hard times. However what sets her apart in  the knarly world of “begging” is her tenacity. She demands a response from you as you go by, looks right at you, and says "will you give me some money"? It's hard to pretend she hasn't spoken to you. Being the congenital nice-guy that I am; I give her money. Sometimes if I am in a hurry I'll respond by saying, I’ll catch you later or catch you on my way out. In the Blanche Dubois world of I get by on the kindness of strangers, that's a polite no but not to the debt collector. When you come back out of Starbucks, she lifts the cup right up to you and says, okay here I am. If you try to slip away to the corner she gets up, comes over to you, sticks the cup in your face and says “you promised”. There is no getting out of it; there is no escaping the Debt Collector.  Now, I just bring a dollar, resigned to the lesson I learned early in my life that some people (like me) just always end up paying their debts.

Boot Woman:  At Hunter College there is this cross bridge that goes from the West Building to the North Building. (See picture). It’s fun walking across the walkway and seeing the busy street below and looking off into the distance at downtown or uptown New York. One late afternoon as I was hustling to my art class on the 15^th floor of the West building; I saw a young woman walking towards me. Probably a student there and my guess was she was in her early twenties. That would describe countless young women at Hunter….EXCEPT for what she was wearing. She was wearing a loose, flowing dress just above the knee and cowboy boots. Men know women with good legs in a dress and cowboy boots can be attractive and so at first I thought nice.  That was until she was about 4 feet from me when it became apparent to me that she wasn't exactly wearing cowboy boots. What she had on were shoes up to her ankle that were like the bottom half of a pair of cowboy boots and the top half were two perfectly matched tattoos of cowboy boots. Let me repeat this for the speed readers: She had the top half of a pair of cowboy boots tattooed on her legs. This was hard for even me, Mr.  Avant-garde, to comprehend. I’ve seen her twice since then and both times she was wearing clothes that showed off her legs and "her boots". I started thinking what could I have tattooed on me? All kidding aside, it did  make me think, what if men actually led women to believe that they had something they didn't really have, I mean  what if……..uh……...on second thought, never mind, forget that. Just forget I said that!


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