What I really need right now is more bagpipes

Every bagpipe player (Pipest? Piper?) on the planet marched up 5th Avenue yesterday, a mile of them, showing their Irish pride at the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade. I hope it was all of them because if there are more out there, this world is a dark and terrible place.

I say this as a man who has “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” buttons for blood AND love in his heart for his people.

Bagpipes sound like angels trapped in hell.

Come on guys, we’ve been a major force in this country for more than century. Maybe we are on firm enough ground here to set the angels free.

Whacha think?

Dogs and cats living together in my mind

I didn’t want to think about animals Sunday. I just didn’t.

I don’t usually want to think about animals at all – one reason I don’t own any – but I certainly didn’t want to think about them on Sunday. It wasn’t a religious prohibition. There is no “Thou shalt not ponder, nor shalt thou dwell upon puppies” in any of the world’s holy texts. It wasn’t a political protest, although I like the idea of “International Forget About Animals Day”. I also like “Ignore the Children Day” and “Scratch Your Butt and Give Out With a Glorious Sigh Day”, but I doubt I can find much support for any of them.

It wasn’t anything but Sunday. I just didn’t want the aggravation. That’s right. I said aggravation.

Consider me small-hearted if you like, but thinking about animals – specifically those animals commonly referred to as pets – never fails to annoy me. If I can avoid a direct reference or blatant visual, I manage not to really see pets – more specifically those pets commonly referred to as dogs – roaming the streets being pet-like as opposed to animal-like while their owners roam the streets and being pet-owner-like as opposed to human-like. But once I’ve thought about the first pet, a chain reaction happens and I’m thinking about and being annoyed by them all day long.

I didn’t’ want that on Sunday. I was having a good day. I woke up early, wrote for a couple of hours, took a nap, woke up at noon, had a little cheese and fruit, took another nap and was ready to walk around the city I love for the rest of the afternoon and enjoy the pre-spring temperatures that had pushed into the mid-50s.

I made it as far as Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side, almost four short blocks from the Delancy Street subway station, before I was pet mugged. I don’t know if it was the fact that I have a kind face (I doubt that), or if the woman unlocking the door to her apartment building was just mean-spirited. It doesn’t really matter. There I was, strolling down the street, pets the farthest thing from my mind, when she made eye contact and smiled.

I should have known something bad was going to happen. Nobody makes eye contact and smiles when they are entering an apartment building. That’s a universal moment of vulnerability in the city. Your concentration is split, you have a locked door in front of you and there’s no place to run. And yet this woman made eye contact with a stranger walking toward her on the sidewalk and smiled.

I met her eye and she said, “Say, do you want a cat?”

“Oh, good Lord, no!” I said it with a force that startled both of us. “I can’t believe you asked me that.”

“I’ve got this extra cat …”

“Stop it!” Then, and this is the truth and shows just how disturbed I was by the exchange, I clapped my hands over my ears and said, “I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you,” as I practically sprinted down the street away from her.

But it was too late. I had heard her. I had been tainted. I was doomed to pet-think for the rest of the day. Every pile of dog shit on the sidewalk glowed. Every dribble of dog piss shimmered. Every yap from a little yippy dog stabbed into my eardrum. Every corner pet store shoved its most ridiculous items into the display windows and surrounded them with neon arrows that pointed and signs that flashed, “Bob, you poor bastard, look at this!”

“Look! St. Patty’s Day leprechaun outfits. Look! Back massagers for poodles. Look! Puppy strollers. Look! Spiked cat harnesses.”

But that wasn’t the end of it. Memories of every pile of shit, puddle of piss, yap of yip and stupid costume I had ever experienced flowed over me. Months of pet-related distress buzzed in my brain.

My mind literally reeled. My balance was affected. I tried to rein it in, but I was in the weeds, wobbly, trying to make sense of it all.

I was wearing a light sweater because there was a cool breeze and I’m fur deprived. Dogs were passing me wearing their God-given fur AND human-given coats. And it wasn’t one or two of them either. At several points in my trek I was literally swarmed by animals wearing clothes. Every day in this city people are homeless and hungry and yet border collies are wearing leather coats, poodles are getting back massages and English bulldogs are riding around in strollers.

Something really bad is happening, and I’m apparently the only one who can see it.

Here’s what I think has happened. Dogs have evolved a way to secrete hormones that eat away at the human frontal lobe, thereby domesticating us.

I present the following evidence:

I was standing at a corner, waiting for traffic to ebb when a woman in a puffy coat walked by with a pug in a light blue slicker on a leash. The dog trotted over to me, sniffed my foot and attempted to raise its hind leg on my shoe. I didn’t kick the dog, per se, but there was a vigorous foot-assisted relocation.

The woman glared. “How dare you?”

How dare I? How dare I? I called her glare and raised her an angry retort. “Lady, your dog just tried to piss on my foot.”

She huffed off, and I swear the pug looked back at me and winked.

Then, a couple of blocks away, outside the dog walk in Tompkins Square Park, a man had his English bulldog – a massive, meaty bulldog – stuffed into a stroller. That was disturbing enough, but the spectacle had drawn a crowd, and not the lynch mob I wanted to form. This crowd stood beaming at this disgusting public display of human debauchery, the likes of which have not been seen since the orgies near the end of the Roman Empire.

But that wasn’t the bad part. That didn’t signal the Visigoths at the gate. Another man bent over, patted the slab of meat’s ham-size head and said (I shit you not), “Isn’t he sooooo cute? Look, a big strand of drool is about to fall.” The rest of the crowd “ooooh’d” and beamed.

And the bulldog sat, a flaccid, placid emperor before his bootlicking senate.

I fled. I could smell my own fear. Out of the park, across Avenue A and east on 9th Street I ran, the kind of panic one gets in a nightmare beating in my chest. Home. Home. I had to get home. I found I was carrying the knowledge of mankind’s collapse in my head. My spine had become a sharpen pike that the weight of this awareness had driven into my heart.

Ahead, man was digging through a trashcan. As I got closer, he emerged from the waste with a magazine in his hand. I noticed he was oddly well dressed for a bum. He saw me and started to wave the magazine at me. Then he started to run at me.

Then he started shouting. “Over there! Look out! To your left! To you left!”

A quick glance to my left showed me there was nothing there but a couple of parked cars on 9th Street. I faced the charging well-dressed, magazine-wielding bum, and started shifting my backpack off my shoulders so I’d have greater freedom of movement in the impending fight.

“Step to your left!” he shouted and tore a page from the magazine. “My dog … my dog …”

And there it was; a red, wiry-haired dog of unclear pedigree, sitting serenely with its leash unattended and a trail of dog shit snaking down the sidewalk behind it. The man, for whom I suddenly felt more pity than if he had been a bum, started doing a squatty hop and plucked the shit up with the paper one piece at a time like he was gathering a bouquet of wildflowers.

I outwardly thanked him for his civic mindedness, but inwardly I cursed his self-imposed slavery.

Something snapped. The buildings buckled and oozed the blood of civilization. In every window I saw the taunting face of a “pet.” On the street, the tethered beasts spoke words of revolution and the people yipped like yorkies.

A woman on Second Avenue carried a Boston terrier in a sling across her chest. It nuzzled her breast. Her face was a pastel wash of bliss.

I wept.

I wept because I could not cry out. “Brothers and Sisters, please! Do not go down like this!”

I could not cry out because a Rottweiler was eyeing my crotch and in its throaty growl I heard “Just give me cause, human.”

I could not cry out because a spindly woman with liver-spot talons and orange hair had five teacup terriers – so many land piranha – waiting for the scent of my blood.

So, I wept. And I ran, back to the comforting embrace of savage subway rats.

At Houston Street, outside the Whole Foods and the Second Avenue F station, I passed a seeing-eye dog humming, “We shall overcome.”

When I can make myself leave my room, I am going to hunt down the woman trying to give away cats on Ludlow Street. When I find her, and I swear by all I hold holy I will find her, I am going to give her a right good scolding.

On second thought, maybe I won’t. It occurs to me I could be playing right into their hands. She may be in cahoots, infected … one of the beaming pet-tender pods. I’ll bet she is. After all, she did smile in a moment of universal vulnerability.

I just wanted a couple of t-shirts

Spring is on the way and with it, almost whispered in the sharp breezes, is the call to restock my spring wardrobe. This, of course, means I need more t-shirts – colored t-shirts: no pockets, no slogans, no brands, no designs. Just t-shirts – plain and simple.

I have five or six plain tees already (and a couple of branded t-shirts that fit and don’t offend too much), which would carry me through an average week between laundry visits, but I – apparently -- am a slave to consumerism. At a gut level, a dark level where control fails, I need to freshen my look for spring.

To fulfill this primal urge, I followed a giant red posterboard

!!!!!!
Up to
50% Off
!!!!!!

starburst into an O.M.G. store on Broadway just north of Canal Street.

Oh. My. God. … That’s the name of the store.

O.M.G.

Oh, my God?

It is Canal discount retail in a Soho boutique retail space. High ceilings, bright lights, thumping music, a dozen or so cheery young retail clerks scurrying about, hip-hop hoodies, baseball caps, $100 shoes, jeans, jeans and more jeans … and t-shirts – most with nesting skulls or white-on-black flames or 8-balls or Obama or the rest of this year’s cool symbols of urban American youth.

Granted, I’m cool. Granted, I’m urban now. Granted, I’m American. But … I can’t, with any real conviction, lay claim to youth anymore. It’s the silver in the beard, I think. Or maybe the fact that chronologically I am standing on the sidewalk in front of the dreary Manoir de Middle Age, a “For Rent” yard sign in my hand.

As I walked past the jeans, jeans and more jeans toward a stack of t-shirts that looked to be your plain, general purpose Fruit of the Loom Heavy tees near the cash register, a cheery young retail clerk woman swooped in on me … at my six, out of the sun. I didn’t even hear her coming until she buzzed my ear.

“Help you?” she asked in a cute, cheery Hispanic-swept Brooklyn accent. She was about 5-foot-6 and curvy in a blood-churning way.

“Just looking, thanks.”

I always say that, even when I’m on a genetically induced, seasonally specific wardrobe mission. “Just looking, thanks.” I wasn’t just looking. I was a driven man. I was a haunted, hunted man. I was a man consumed by a need for tees.

“Just looking, thanks.”

“Kay,” she said. “Could you look here for a minute then?” She pointed to a wall, 20-foot high and loaded with Levis 505 jeans. “I really need to stretch my back out and I can’t unless I’m talking to you. Rules …” She rolled her eyes.

“Anything to help,” I said. I’m just that kind of pro-labor fellow.

I pulled a pair of jeans out of the stack and checked the price. $48. She started stretching. It was actually closer to writhing, thrusting and jutting than stretching, but it wasn’t my place to say that. Add a pole and a mirror ball and a platform and I would have been holding a $10 beer and a fist full of dollar bills instead of a $48 pair of jeans. I put the jeans back, making sure the stack was squared off.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said with a smile.

“Yes I do,” I said. “O.C.D. Attention to detail.”

In response, she bent and touched the floor with the palms of her hands … with a smile.

O.M.G.

“Just looking, thanks.”

I couldn’t see Manoir de Middle Age anywhere anymore. It was gone in a flex and a flash of youthful sun, but a line about washed-up, middle-age salesman Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman” flashed through my head. “Attention must be paid.”

And attention was paid … to the gentle curve of my cheery, stretchy stripper clerk’s tawny back at that point in reality and fantasy where shirt and jeans fail to meet.

“So, finally attention must be paid to such a person.” And who am I to argue with a classic of American theater?

Out of the thumping din of jeans, jeans and more jeans – at my six, out of the sun – another cheery Hispanic-swept Brooklyn accent pushed into my head.

“36/32,” it said, a runaway non sequitur careening into and derailing a warm train of thought. Again. “36/32.”

“Huh?”

“36/32.”

I turned to face the voice. It belonged to a cheery, short, round clerk with slivers of silver stabbed through various parts of her face. She was holding a pair of khakis, which she thrust in my face.

“Excuse me?”

“36/32. I got you 36/32.”

For the record, I wear a 32/32 … so I said, in what (upon reflection) was an amazingly girly voice, “Do I look like a 36?” I don’t know where the voice came from and I hope it never returns, but there it was. “Do I look like a 36?”

My cheery, stretchy, stripper clerk straightened up and said with what (upon reflection) was a sly smile, “Not even close.”

“Aren’t you him?” the cheery little round clerk asked.

“I’m sorry. I don’t. … What?” I asked.

Her bulb grew dim. I watched it on her face.

“He ain’t a 36, Kimee.”

“You’re looking for a rounder guy,” I added, hopefully helpfully.

Kimee threw the khakis on the rack, right next to my precious tees -- $4.25 each. “36/32,” she said.

“T-shirts,” I said to my stretchy clerk with her back like summer sun. I was very confused, grasping for something to keep me from falling down the thumping, shopping, stretching, gay-voiced 36/32 rabbit hole of hip-hop hoodies, tawny backs, high-dollar sneakers, sly smiles, jeans, jeans and more jeans.

“T-shirts. That’s what I’m looking for.” She nodded, smiled again and walked across the store to another customer. T-shirts don’t justify floorshows at O.M.G.

I was left with poor, lost Kimee.

She stood next to me as I searched for a large gray t-shirt from the stack (returning each failed attempt to the stack, squared off and tidy) and kept muttering “36/32” into thumping air. Suddenly – at my six, out of the sun – a male voice rang out from across the store. “Are those my pants?”

I whipped around hoping to see a tubby doppelganger. Instead I saw a man about my height, but that’s where the comparison ended. It was wishful thinking on the 36-inch waist for one thing. He had a full head of hair for another. And, finally, he was … old.

I threw Kimee a glance and hissed in her ear, “You thought I was him? He’s old enough to be my father. You are so off my Christmas card list.”

She threw me a blank stare. Actually, she didn’t throw it. It just sort of dribbled out of her eyes. “36/32,” she said, then went to help her old man with a pleats v. no pleats conundrum. I was left to my t-search.

That’s when I noticed another old guy – thin, balding, looking through a stack of t-shirts – in the full-length mirror to my right. And Manoir de Middle Age arose out of the mist of my mind.

O.M.G.