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A Trip to New York (II)

I've returned from New York, which was its standard New York self.


You need linebacker gear to fight your way to a seat in a diner; you need to decipher tiny clues before cracking the code of the seating regulations at a dingy midtown Pain Quotidien, and you need to brave the wrath of an under-employed wannabe actor when you dare to ask to see a menu (twenty to thirty minutes after having been seated).....


If you enter a cab, you tacitly take on responsibility for the cab-driver's untreated mental illness. This can take a few forms, but maybe the most common is: Hey, tourist! Listen to my comedy routine! As you inch your way along Sixth Avenue, you must feign interest in the driver-anecdotes:


Thirty-six degrees today, and a guy gets in my backseat, and he is just wearing shorts! Shorts in this weather! I'm like.....OK......


But now I'm back in suburbia, and I wonder about the tradeoff. In suburbia, the loudest voice I hear belongs to my neighbor, Biff Komanski, who must be 800 or 900 years old.


Biff never received the memo about mansplaining--so he feels free to email the forty families around him with a stern lecture about garage lights. The lecture has an image of McGruff the Crime Dog--and there is an attached spreadsheet with each homeowner identified by name, followed by a report on whether any given homeowner has a garage light installed.


When Biff can take his mind off lighting, he is often worrying aloud about his missing copy of the Times. He is the final person on Earth to receive a daily paper copy of the Times, and when the deliveryman screws up, Biff makes sure that I hear the full story.


Biff also has worries about acorn disposal: The Maplewood acorns were unusually large this season (!) .....and there is really no clear procedure to follow, if you're unwilling to stir up a big pot of acorn stew.


And so it goes. Like sands through the hourglass....

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