Tag: New York

  • Hey! Snow! Which Doesn’t Happen Anymore!

    Up where I live in Harlem, we got little over an inch of snow overnight and this morning. Besides the fact that snow is fun, the other big story with the snow is that this storm snapped the 701-day streak of New York City not receiving at least an inch of snow. Seriously, we have nearly gone two years without any real snow in New York. You know, because the climate is changing.

    It’s funny how in my twenty years in New York, I have witnessed the climate of this place turned on it’s head. Maybe not “funny,” but like “ironic-sad?” No, that’s not correct either. More like, “Depressing-Tears-of-a-Clown” kind’a funny. There we go; that’s accurate.

    When I moved up here, there was snow in November. That first winter, it sleeted on Valentine’s Day, and was so cold that the sleet froze and iced the City for five days. We’d get snow like rain showers, and added on top of that, at least two blizzards a season. And it would be cold enough that snow/ice wouldn’t melt for weeks. That feels like a million years ago, and fairy tale of Winters-Gone-By.

    It’s also true when it comes to Spring and Fall. May used to be an amazing month in the City. It would only get up to 70 at the warmest, nothing below the 50’s at night, and each day of the month it would incrementally get warmer. Everything would start blooming, grass came back to life, and the skies would be just the bluest. September was equally amazing; just like May but in reverse. A slow slide into Fall – You would start the month in shorts and end in a sweater. Now, May and September are bi-polar, raging between too hot and too cold. The gradualness of these months are gone.

    Sure, you could dismiss me as the old guy yelling at a cloud, but the weather facts back me up. It’s warmer and the inclement weather is more erratic. The world is changing, and I at least have enough faith that humanity will be able to adapt, but I’m not so sure on solving this problem. I fear we may never go back to the way it was.

    Ung…

    This went a little darker than I wanted.

    Look I wanted to end with the idea that most likely, I’m going to go sledding with the kid after school, because snow is still fun. Especially to kids and middle-aged men who grew up in Texas and never had any winter weather to play in.

  • Try Again Tomorrow (Unedited)

    I took the dog to the groomer, and that threw off my entire day.

    I mean it was scheduled. In my calendar, so I knew it was coming. The end result, other that the dog having a very nice “puppy cut,” is that I got nothing dome that I wanted to get done.

    Normally I blog in the morning, but I didn’t get around to it until 6pm today. I didn’t do any journaling, and the sketchbook is just a hope at this point – maybe even a wish.

    But the groomer. Walking the dog twenty blocks to drop her off is what really did it. I know lots of people take their dogs on the subway now, and it doesn’t bother me. But I can’t do it. Only because if another dog got in the car, my dog would go apeshit. That and she’s take a dump on the train. (She once took a huge dump while I was in line at an ATM. That was a good day…) So I have to walk her, and I really don’t mind. I do like our neighborhood.

    Also, this is the closest groomer to our apartment, just in case anyone is wondering…

    Which I know no one is…

    That extra forty blocks really took it outta me. Zapped my energy, and the only thing I kept turning over in my mind was that Lauren Boebert was kicked out of a touring performance of the musical of Beetlejuice in Denver because she was being rowdy and using a vape.

    Ahh…

    Try again tomorrow…

  • Everyone’s Back at It

    Today was the first day of school in New York City. Well, for the public schools anyway. But it was also, officially, no fooling this time, the end of Summer for everybody; as somehow, magically it seems, everyone returned to the City over night, and they all decided that they needed to use public transit this morning. There was such a dramatic change in the number of people on the subway this morning, that even my daughter was like, Where did all these people come from?

    The Cycle begins again, I said.

    I got a blank stare from the kid.

    Everyone is back from vacation and has to go to work and school. Then I added, The City’s full again.

    It’s true, the City has all its people back, and from what I observed this morning, most people didn’t have a good time on vacation, because their attitudes were rather piss poor. I mean, this Cycle seems to really have brought out the bad and gruff attitudes in New Yorkers.

    This is my sixteenth Post-Labor Day return, and I am still impressed by it. See, it’s an event that annually happens in NYC, but no one talks about it. People talk about the City emptying out for the Summer, but no one mentions the inevitable return. (If we talk of the yen, should we not talk of the yang?) I find it odd that, as a city, NYC seems to love to point out its annual traditions and cycles, marking the changing of seasons and time, yet The Return (I’m coining it) is a verboten topic of discussion.

    Maybe it’s a tad depressing to talk about the end of Summer.

    Or it might be more basic than that…

    No one wants to go back to work.

  • ODDS and ENDS: The End of Summer, Disc Golf, and My Phone Says I’m Healthy

    (You’ll find it funny later…)

    Labor Day is Monday, and as such, Autumn begins on Tuesday. Happy Fall, Ya’ll! I am going to try very hard to not talk about the weather like the old man I am slowly evolving into. (Even though we are about to enter nine days of high heat in the City!) We made it to the start of September, and as soon as Labor day is concluded, the marathon to New Year begins; such is the cycle. Our lives have always been like this, but when we added a kid to the mix, and especially when she started school, it has taken on a stronger relevance in our lives. Labor Day means the start of school, and it takes time for us to get back to that flow of life. Soon, the kid will start talking about Halloween costumes, and apple picking will be scheduled. We’ll fit in a final hike before it starts to get too cold, so we can enjoy the leaves changing color. Then the planning of Thanksgiving starts, and the hope of Christmas is never too far away. Autumn never comes fast enough and it never last long enough.

    I like disc golf. I’m not good at it, and I don’t do it often enough, but it’s an activity that I look forward to doing. I have mention before how I have started watching disc golf tournaments on YouTube, and I even got the UDisc app for my phone, so I am making an effort to be more involved. The newest thought I have been percolating on is attending a local tournament, something that I could drive to, and back in one day. I am curious to see how these things are run. You know, what is it like?

    My phone noticed that I have been more active of late. And like all good friends, it has started encouraging me to keep it going. I have been walking more in the City., that’s true. When I had a job where I went to an office, I walked between 9,000 to 10,0000 steps a day during the week. When Covid hit, I dropped down to an average of 4,000 steps a day. (I can’t prove it, but this might be part of the reason I put on twenty pounds. Just a thought.) With the kid back in school, and walking to drop her off and pick her up, my new weekday average is over 10,000 steps. This is a good thing, and adding that I have returned to the gym, I’m moving in a healthier direction. But my phone has interpreted this development in activity as an invitation to start giving more advice about how I should eat, sleep, and other things to make me “healthier.” The phone is coming on a little too strong. I just want to be friends with “healthier,” not looking for a commitment. Maybe if I drop twenty pounds, we can talk. Until then, I’m just having fun.

  • Not the Dream I Wanted

    I don’t remember my dreams. Or, it’s very rare that I remember a dream. When I do remember one, what sticks with me is an image, or a feeling. People and places will be there, but it’s like everything is frozen in a moment that I am very much aware has events that happened before this frozen moment, and sometimes, I even know what will happen after. It’s all very strange.

    The rarest dream that I have is the full-blown narrative, and interaction with people. That’s what happened to me last night. And it was awful.

    I dreamed about people I used to work with, and not the friendly and good people who became my friends. No, I dreamt about all the awful people that I didn’t get along with, or who went out of their way to make my employment as unenjoyable as possible. In this dream, I was holding open a door to a church so people could enter. And then all of my former co-workers showed up, and refused to go through the door I was holding open. They didn’t say anything to me, just made eye contact, and then went to a different door. The overwhelming feeling I was getting was that when I went to work on Monday, I was going to get fired.

    Yeah, it was a terrible dream, and what made the dream worse was when I woke up, I thought the dream was real, and I had to get up and go to that job. It took a second for me to come out of it, knowing that I didn’t have an office to report to, but that feeling of dread and anxiety has been hung all over me this morning.

    Dread and anxiety is what I felt when I went into the office most days. Some of it was caused by the people I worked with, who starred in my dream. But, most of it was caused by me. Most days, as I packed myself on a subway car, listening to music and reading The Times or New Yorker on my phone – doing my best to shut out the world on my commute – I would wonder if this would be another day wasted? That if this was a job that was slowly killing me; sucking out my ambition and drive and all the reasons why I wanted to move away from home and try something different. As I get more space and time to reflect on my office days, I can see that some of the issues I had were me not being happy with the situation I placed myself in. Don’t get me wrong – the shitty people were still shitty people, but I allowed them to get to me for far too long.

    But that’s the point of reflection, right? To learn lessons from your own life and actions. What I now know is that when I sense those feelings of dread and anxiety, I need to get the hell out of that situation. Odds are that I will return to an office one day, and if I do, I know the warning signs to watch out for.

    That’s progress.

    But I can’t figure out why I was at a church in the dream…