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City officials in Brooklyn, like the rest of New York City, are making an active effort to create bicycle friendly streets. They are designating bike lanes and paths all over the place. These things are well marked and there is a map telling cyclists where the routes are. I follow them when possible, primarily because they are well placed to take you from one part of the borough to another.
The problem is that traffic hasn’t entirely caught on to the idea that bicycles are part of life now and need to be respected. It isn’t unusual to have a couple of near death experiences anytime you ride for any distance. Some one is going to run a red light or swerve into the bike lane. Something is going to happen to keep a cyclist on his toes.
And that’s fine. After all, we are traffic and traffic is a dangerous place for anyone.
Yesterday was actually a good day to ride. Traffic was light and there weren’t too many assholes parked in the bike lane. I was on Bergen Street, in the bicycle lane, making pretty good time. Someone up ahead decided to double park in my lane, so I glanced over my right shoulder. Plenty of room. Things were swell. I started to move into the car lane and heard the van 30 feet behind me stomp on the gas to race me to the squeeze point. I put on the brakes and dropped back. It was too nice a day to die, even though I was in the right. A “Christian Ambulette Inc.” van shot past me, side mirror whispering past my right shoulder.
I’m a positive guy, always looking at the bright side. I’m sure the driver of the Christian Ambulette was just trying to help by sending me to meet my maker a little early. Why extend the suffering on this mortal coil when there’s glory and eternal life on the other side, right?
Except it is rather presumptuous. First, I’m not a Christian. There’s no snowy bearded father waiting for me on the other side with open arms. Second, I’m in good health … even great health, for my age. This mortal coil is treating me quite well, thanks. If the Christian driver really wanted to help someone, he should have considered his passenger and slowed down for me. After all, the person in the ambulette was already ill and most likely Christian. Why rush to get them medical treatment? Send them home, obey the law and let the atheist live. Everyone wins.
I would have explained this to the driver, but he was disappearing into the distance. Instead, I just fruitlessly flipped him off and shouted “Jesus Christ!” into the wind.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Ah, grandparents taking the babies to breakfast … how charming … urp.
I stopped at Marine’s Coffee Shop (Bergen and 5th Avenue, Brooklyn) in Park Slope for breakfast yesterday. The menu on the window said they had a Spanish breakfast. I’ve never had a Spanish breakfast. It seemed like a prime opportunity to break two fasts at once, and at $4 it was cheaper than a plane ticket.
I settled into the corner table – after stripping off three layers of bicycle gear – and ordered cassava and eggs. (There’s a short review on Marine’s in the Google map on the main page of www.neoflaneur.blogspot, if you care.) About five minutes after a tucked into people-watching mode, a couple in their late 40s or early 50s came in with two girls under five.
My initial thought was, “Aw, grandparents out for a day”. But this is Park Slope and I forgot to take into account a particularly New York disease. One of the girls was whining about how she was cold, she didn’t want to eat eggs, she wanted ice cream.
“Mommy doesn’t like it when you talk that way,” the crazy woman said.
“Daddy doesn’t like it either,” the idiot with her said.
I got a little throw up in my mouth. I took a sip of coffee to clear away the bile and shook my head to clear it. People smart enough to make enough money to live in Park Slope aren’t smart enough to know that children are either the result of youthful indiscretions or, if deliberate, a young person’s sport. Not in New York. It is something you see all the time. Grown people completely out of their minds and ill-equipped for the physical and emotional abuse that come factory stock with children. If the damage was localized to the reproducing idiots, I’d have a problem with the disease but I’d get over it. The thing with late parentitis, though, is that it has an impact on everyone … for generations
Hillary Clinton was wrong. It doesn’t take a village to raise a child. It takes a clue and a cattle prod.
Mommy looked at this whiny little creature she’d deliberately conceived at Lord knows what cost and, in what can only be one of the best examples of clueless parenting I have seen in years, said in a high-pitched, goo-goo voice best reserved for pocket dogs and the mentally thin, “BABY, you’re a big girl now, not a BABY.”
Urp. Fuck me. I could taste where this was going the way I could taste the bile in the back of my throat. There is nothing sadistic little bits of the human variety like more than mixed messages and this cute little Satan spawn was just handed an Tech 9 and a full clip. She sprayed the restaurant. Her sister, not to be left out of the firefight, reached into her own arsenal gathered from a lifetime of over-entitled “Daddy loves you. Please stop. Really, please stop. Ah, baby, pllllllleeease. Have a candy bar. Daddy loves you”, loaded up and fired two rounds into the ceiling.
“Alright, everybody, on the ground. This is an emotional hold-up.”
Fuck me.
At this point, I should have done something constructive. I should have handed daddy a pair of balls, maybe, or mommy a pamphlet I’ve not yet written titled “Never Let Them See You Sweat: An adult’s guide to raising what seemed like a good idea at the time”. I didn’t. I just stared and shook my paternalistic head in a condescending way every time one of the parents scanned the room in a panic. It didn’t help, but I enjoyed myself and that’s what I was out and about for.
I’m a bad man.
Here's a google view of the joint.
View Larger Map
I settled into the corner table – after stripping off three layers of bicycle gear – and ordered cassava and eggs. (There’s a short review on Marine’s in the Google map on the main page of www.neoflaneur.blogspot, if you care.) About five minutes after a tucked into people-watching mode, a couple in their late 40s or early 50s came in with two girls under five.
My initial thought was, “Aw, grandparents out for a day”. But this is Park Slope and I forgot to take into account a particularly New York disease. One of the girls was whining about how she was cold, she didn’t want to eat eggs, she wanted ice cream.
“Mommy doesn’t like it when you talk that way,” the crazy woman said.
“Daddy doesn’t like it either,” the idiot with her said.
I got a little throw up in my mouth. I took a sip of coffee to clear away the bile and shook my head to clear it. People smart enough to make enough money to live in Park Slope aren’t smart enough to know that children are either the result of youthful indiscretions or, if deliberate, a young person’s sport. Not in New York. It is something you see all the time. Grown people completely out of their minds and ill-equipped for the physical and emotional abuse that come factory stock with children. If the damage was localized to the reproducing idiots, I’d have a problem with the disease but I’d get over it. The thing with late parentitis, though, is that it has an impact on everyone … for generations
Hillary Clinton was wrong. It doesn’t take a village to raise a child. It takes a clue and a cattle prod.
Mommy looked at this whiny little creature she’d deliberately conceived at Lord knows what cost and, in what can only be one of the best examples of clueless parenting I have seen in years, said in a high-pitched, goo-goo voice best reserved for pocket dogs and the mentally thin, “BABY, you’re a big girl now, not a BABY.”
Urp. Fuck me. I could taste where this was going the way I could taste the bile in the back of my throat. There is nothing sadistic little bits of the human variety like more than mixed messages and this cute little Satan spawn was just handed an Tech 9 and a full clip. She sprayed the restaurant. Her sister, not to be left out of the firefight, reached into her own arsenal gathered from a lifetime of over-entitled “Daddy loves you. Please stop. Really, please stop. Ah, baby, pllllllleeease. Have a candy bar. Daddy loves you”, loaded up and fired two rounds into the ceiling.
“Alright, everybody, on the ground. This is an emotional hold-up.”
Fuck me.
At this point, I should have done something constructive. I should have handed daddy a pair of balls, maybe, or mommy a pamphlet I’ve not yet written titled “Never Let Them See You Sweat: An adult’s guide to raising what seemed like a good idea at the time”. I didn’t. I just stared and shook my paternalistic head in a condescending way every time one of the parents scanned the room in a panic. It didn’t help, but I enjoyed myself and that’s what I was out and about for.
I’m a bad man.
Here's a google view of the joint.
View Larger Map
A bike ride through Brooklyn
The weather was clear and cold yesterday, so I bundled up, hopped on the bicycle at 8 a.m. and took a ride through Brooklyn. I’m finding that the way to discover Brooklyn – even more so than Manhattan – is on a bicycle. And in the process, I’m starting to develop a deeper love of the borough. For one thing, more people live in Brooklyn (1.8 million) than on the island (1.3 million), and these are people of all stripes.
My neighborhood, for example is pretty heavily West Indian. About a quarter mile to the south, Hasidic Jews take over. Two miles to the northwest, the hipsters have the helm. To the southwest about three miles, the yuppies have taken over my old neighborhood. You’ve got the Irish to my east and five miles south it’s Russian. The list goes on. There are pockets of ethnicity and class with blurred lines between.
I don’t know Queens yet, so I can’t do a compare and contrast … yet. I’ve made a couple of contacts and have heard the stories though. I will get there one day. I do know that the bicycle has stripped away the physical restriction of convenient transportation and opened all these neighborhoods in Brooklyn up for me.
That’s not to say mass transit fails in Brooklyn. The system works. The job is just different. In Manhattan, the subway is designed to get people around the island. In Brooklyn the subway is designed to get people to the island. This is a critical difference for a wanderer. And Brooklyn is not really a walking town … too residential and sprawling for that.
But the bicycle is the right tool for the job. Yesterday, I used it.
I rode from my flat in Bed-Sty to Cobble Hill, then down to the Gowanus Canal on the fringe of Red Hook and up 9th Street to Park Slope for breakfast. The trip took me through dirt poverty to industrial waste to big money in about two hours.
Can you think of a better way to spend a crisp Saturday morning? I can, but not flying solo.
My neighborhood, for example is pretty heavily West Indian. About a quarter mile to the south, Hasidic Jews take over. Two miles to the northwest, the hipsters have the helm. To the southwest about three miles, the yuppies have taken over my old neighborhood. You’ve got the Irish to my east and five miles south it’s Russian. The list goes on. There are pockets of ethnicity and class with blurred lines between.
I don’t know Queens yet, so I can’t do a compare and contrast … yet. I’ve made a couple of contacts and have heard the stories though. I will get there one day. I do know that the bicycle has stripped away the physical restriction of convenient transportation and opened all these neighborhoods in Brooklyn up for me.
That’s not to say mass transit fails in Brooklyn. The system works. The job is just different. In Manhattan, the subway is designed to get people around the island. In Brooklyn the subway is designed to get people to the island. This is a critical difference for a wanderer. And Brooklyn is not really a walking town … too residential and sprawling for that.
But the bicycle is the right tool for the job. Yesterday, I used it.
I rode from my flat in Bed-Sty to Cobble Hill, then down to the Gowanus Canal on the fringe of Red Hook and up 9th Street to Park Slope for breakfast. The trip took me through dirt poverty to industrial waste to big money in about two hours.
Can you think of a better way to spend a crisp Saturday morning? I can, but not flying solo.
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