Subway Savage

What a horrific ride home this evening on the NYC subway. As per usual, there were too many straphangers squeezing and elbowing their way into the car, which is fine when one expects it. However, I hadn't prepared myself emotionally for the utter jackass who positioned himself directly next to me.

He wasn't young (maybe 15 or so) or mentally deficient, so I was surprised by his complete lack of awareness of his immediate surroundings. The reckless monster spent the whole ride in conversation with his mother, all the while dangling himelf languidly from the bar on the ceiling.

Dangling, yes.

When the car swayed, he swayed. When the car sped up, he would plow into me with the full weight of his contorted adolescent body. Again, and again.

Until finally I barked, "Can you please stop that!" He stared at me for an astonished second with his beady, lifeless orbs, then returned to the vacuous conversation with his guardian. He also immediately resumed his gymnastic assault.

What really astonished me was not that he was acting that way, but that his mother made no attempt to stop the asinine activity. It almost makes it difficult to blame the obtuse little bastard when he clearly was never taught any manners to begin with.

Anyway, this went on for the entirety of the twenty-minute trip. It seemed like an hour.

On the television: President Bush is addressing the nation.

He's trying to explain his way out of having no clear strategy in Iraq. And smirking at the conclusion of every sentence. Does that bother anybody else?

This speech is just a repetition of the same tired, old nonsense that he's been spouting for four years now. The formula calls for using the word terrorist in every third sentense, while using the word freedom at least once in each of the other two. It works though. I just caught myself unconsciously tying a yellow ribbon around the coffee table leg.

Amazing.

Facha!

Have you ever seen the Walt Stillman movie Barcelona?

This got me thinking about it today: "Italian Judge Orders Arrest of 13 CIA Operatives for Kidnapping"

It was the headline on the front page of the New York Times today. I'm certain that every major newspaper in the world had a variation of this headline on their front page as well. In brief, an Italian judge issued warrants for the arrest of not one or two, but thirteen CIA operatives accused of involvement in the kidnapping of a radical Muslim imam, Osama Mustafa Hassan.

The imam in question was under suspicion for some variety of terrorist activity, and was already being investigated by the Italian authorities.

On February 17th, 2003, however, the CIA took matters into their own hands without, I presume, the consent of the Italians. In broad daylight, a van pulled up next to Hassan as he walked to his mosque, and two men masquerading as Italian police officers grabbed him and thrusted him to an unmarked van.

He was not heard from again until sometime in 2004.

The United States calls this "extraordinary rendition." This tactic in the government's fight against terrorism involves plucking people from their homes, places of employment, the street, or anywhere else they wish, and shipping them to sovereign countries whose policies they publicly criticize.

Why? So they can be properly tortured, without having to nod to any kind of convention regarding the ethical treatment of suspects and detainees. Hassan claims to have been repeatedly electrocuted by his Egyptian interrogators.

Scary stuff, don't you agree?

People have become afraid of the U.S. government, and it's 400 different and conflicting national security and intelligence agencies. They should be, it's out very much out of control. And it's humiliating to [at least some of] its citizens that our leaders are sanctioning this kind of behavior in its agencies.

Is the world safer for it?

Anyway, in Barcelona, which is set during the Cold War, one of subplots deals with the younger Spanish generation's preoccupation with things they perceive as fascist (everything is facha), naked American aggression, and the fear that agents of the CIA are skulking around them - plotting, subverting, and assassinating.

It's funny because they were mostly misinformed. What's not funny is that, despite all the silly misinformation, they were absolutely correct about the plotting, subverting, and assassinating.

It's alarming that we've stepped back into a state of affairs in which our government agencies are operating in the same roundly-criticized manner as they did from the 1950's to the 1980's. I'm sure that history will condemn this as well. What's sad is that nothing's being done about it presently.

It's all very facha!

On a lighter note, I'll be attending a real barbeque (not a hibachi on the fire-escape) tomorrow in Nyack, NY, high on the banks of the Hudson River. It's really beautiful there. It's a little bit rustic, and has a small-town feel. It'll be nice.

Then, on Sunday, I'll be going to the beach on Long Island. Yes, I do live the life of Riley.

Philadelphia: Part I

For want of anything interesting about my life to relay to you today, I thought I'd tell you just a bit about Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as promised two posts ago.

If you've been paying attention to the news these last two weeks, you might have heard something about a Ku Klux Klan member standing trial for crimes committed forty years ago in Mississippi. The backwater waste of life in question, Edgar Ray Killen, was convicted today of having organized the disturbing crimes which were subsequently portrayed in the movie Mississippi Burning.

However, he was only convicted on the lesser charge of manslaughter, from what I presume was a very sympathetic jury. It's unthinkable that, in this day and age in the United States, a jury of this man's peers could rescue him from a well-deserved murder conviction, thereby robbing the victims' families of a full victory. Or is it? Not in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

So, please don't confuse that last bastion of Antebellum America and antediluvian ideologies with Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, my beloved home town.

Philadelphia, or Philly, has about five million residents, which is about half that of New York City. It is situated on the western banks of the useful (that's all, just useful) Delaware River, which separates Pennsylvania from New Jersey. British readers might remember it as the axis of agitation within those damned rogue colonies.

The Declaration of Independence was written in Philadelphia and adopted in 1776, and the Constitution of the United States followed shortly thereafter in 1789. Thus, it is "the Birthplace of America."

In the 19th century, Philadelphia was the glad recipient of wave upon wave of European immigration, most notably from Ireland, Germany, and Italy. South Philadelphia was historically Italian, and is still very much so today. Or, at least, in the collective imagination of it's residents: forgeddabadit. Southwest Philadelphia was where all the Irish went, and were usually engaged in fisticuffs with their jaunty neighbors to the east. Germans, being very German, founded Germantown: fabelhaft! Interesting that if you had asked any one of these groups of people to describe any of the others, they would have most likely accused them of laziness, alcoholism, or spousal abuse.

This is why my grandparents had to elope: She was from Italy, he was from old Irish stock, and both were shunned by the elders of their families for falling in love. It turned out that the Irish were indeed lazy, alcoholic wife-beaters after all, but at the time the suspicion was mostly unfounded. Just kidding, Grandpop.

Philadelphians have the German immigrants to thank for the ubiquitous breakfast treat scrapple which, as suggested by the name, is made of the scraps leftover after everything actually edible has been carved off a pig. It comes in bricks, and is served sliced and fried. It's worth a try if you're in the area but, for the love of god, consider what it's made of and don't do it twice.

Have a cheesesteak instead. Philly is also known as "the Birthplace of Cheesesteaks," and is honestly the only place in the country where one can have a good one. Many other restaurants in many other cities purport to have perfected them as well, but it's all lies and distortions, I assure you. A cheesesteak is made of thinly sliced beef, cooked fresh on a hot griddle, and shredded in the process by a grizzled, spatula-wielding man. It's served on a long, soft roll and topped with cheese and fried onions. They were "invented" at Pat's Steaks in South Philadelphia in the 1930's but, soon after, the ingenious Gino hung his shingle across the street, claiming his were better than Pat's. A messy war has raged since. I prefer Jim's Steaks, though, on South Street in Center City. Jim really refined and perfected the process, bless him.

So, we've gotten the really important facts out of the way. I'll write more about Philly on another occasion. Please, try not to die of anticipatory stress in the meantime.

The Wedding Shower II

What a nice weekend! My family held a second surprise wedding shower for Foxy in Philly this weekend. I'm from Philly, Foxy's from New York, and our families felt that it was asking a lot of the invitees to trek long distances in either direction. We also considered seriously the strain it might have put on the ancient and revered patriarchs and matriarchs of our families. It's always shrewd to avoid exacerbating the extraordinary crankiness of these people whenever possible.

We got a lot of gifts, which is really nice. But we have nowhere to put them, which is really frustrating. The idea is that you get married, buy a place which is presumably larger than the one you currently live in, and then move all this stuff in. So now we're packed floor-to-ceiling with the finest tchotchkes that money can buy at Bed Bath & Beyond. Foxy had to tie a tether to me when I went to the kitchen so I could find my way back.

As I sit here reading the news in my cluttered living room, having finally achieved the level of pagan opulence I've so long sought, I have to applaud the people of Sweden for their ingenious use of Biogas in their public transportation infrastructure. If you're like me, then you might not know what Biogas is. Simply, Biogas is composed of fumes harvested from rotting organic waste, which burns more cleanly than fossil fuel, and invites us all merrily to a flatulent joke or two. Good for them for finally demonstrating that the process can be efficient and effective.

Today, the Biogas Train was unveiled, which will begin running between Linkoeping and Vaestervik in September. God bless the Swedes, they've given us so many things: Ikea, the Temporpedic Sleep System, and lingonberries, to name just a few. I think the rest of the of the world should follow suit immediately, and do away with fossil fuel altogether. For the children, of course.

Also in the news: The CIA knows where Osama Bin Laden is hiding.

"The head of the US Central Intelligence Agency has said he has an "excellent idea" where Osama Bin Laden is hiding."

Really? The U.S. government has to say things like this every now and again to make us secure in the knowledge that our tax dollars are not being pissed away on a wild goose chase in the hinterlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan. In reality, the only thing the CIA can tell us about Osama Bin Laden with any certainty is that he's not operating a barbeque stand in Birmingham, Alabama. So, good people of Birmingham, rest easily.

The Wedding Shower

Foxy Cleopatra has left me home alone on a Saturday once again!

She's attending a wedding shower being held in her honor in a posh suburb of New Jersey. It's women-only, although more and more frequently these days wedding showers are mixed gatherings. I assure you, this is not a complaint.

For some reason, men don't seem to do as well at these types of functions as women and metrosexuals do, so I'm actually very pleased with the format. Perhaps it has something to do with a general lack of interest in all things relating to the announcement, preparation, and execution of nuptials. The lone regret that I have is that I won't be able to sample the mélange of gourmet Arabic creations prepared by the gushing attendees.

I'll just have a cheeseburger here instead.

Update on the Chienne de Sade: she's sleeping the sleep of the just; exhausted after having her overtures rebuffed by the blanket, the coffee table leg, and what is now a sad-looking decorative plant. I suspected, by the look on her face when she spotted it from across the room, that she might attempt some unnatural alliance with it. Ah well, poor thing.

Tonight, Foxy and I are going out with her best friend and Best Friend's boyfriend. We're going to start here in the apartment, then go to some bars in lower Manhattan. It should be a nice time. We'll most likely be staying in a part of Manhattan called TriBeCa, an acronym for Triangle Below Canal.

This neighborhood was revitalized in the last fifteen years by actor Robert De Niro, most notably, and is home to the annual Tribeca Film Festival. It is delineated by Canal Street to the north, Broadway to the east, Vesey Street to the south, and by the mighty Hudson River to the west. In bygone days, Tribeca was the the meat-packing and textile center of New York City. This is still evidenced by the imposing romanesque facades of old factories and the wrought-iron overhangs of former meat-packing facilities. It's a wonderful place to explore.

Tomorrow I leave for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to visit family. It's about an hour and forty-five minutes away from New York to the south, and quite a nice ride. More on Philadelphia, or Philly to those of us in the know, tomorrow.

Sunny, With A Chance of Helicopters

Another beautiful day in New York! Right now it's 72 degrees outside, and slightly breezy. When the weather is like this, there is no better place in the world to be. Except anywhere with the same weather, and a beach.

I need to mention that this can also be a very unsettling time of year. You see, the Uninator is in estrus, and not afraid to let the world know it. As I write this, she's attempting to ravage her blanket. Now she's growling at the blanket and biting it. I'm going into the other room.

In the news:

A helicopter fell out of the sky and into the East River, thankfully resulting in nothing other than a mangled million-dollar piece of equipment. This is the second time in as many weeks that this has happened, so be careful if you're taking a helicopter tour of Manhattan. It appears that you should also be careful if you're taking a tour on the East River these days.

The East river is one of two rivers that flank the island of Manhattan. The other is the Hudson River, which is remarkably wider than the East river, and goes all the way to Canada and the Great Lakes. The Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge, Williamsburg Bridge, 59th Street Bridge (of Simon and Garfunkel fame!), and the Triborough Bridge all span the East River. All told, there are seven bridges and four tunnels that feed Manhattan. And it's still not enough, which you'll quickly discover if you ever try to enter or leave the island in a car.

I just finished eating the world's greatest flame-broiled chicken, or jaaj mishwi, as it's called in Arabic. It's even better than the one Foxy makes. Sorry, Foxy. We got this chicken from a Syrian restaurant in Paterson, New Jersey, which is home to hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern and North African immigrants (the city, not the restaurant). Many newly-arrived immigrants from these parts of the world are now opting to live in Paterson rather than the Atlantic Avenue area of Brooklyn, which has been their traditional terminus. Sadly, I think immigrants are quickly getting priced out of a lot of parts of Brooklyn. Still, the best Arabic food in the entire country may be gotten in either place.

Well, I'm going to go sit at the waterfront outside and take in some of this day before it's gone. I had better put a chastity belt on the Urinator, lest she lose her maidenhood when I turn my back.

Closer

I just watched Closer, a film by Mike Nichols starring Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts, and Clive Owen, a very talented Englishman. A New York Times film critic poses this question: Why can't all movies be made like this?

The simple answer is this: If all films were like Closer, nobody would have eyeballs because we all would have scratched them out long ago in protest.

See it, but only so you can mock it.

We get our movies from NetFlix, an unassuming little enterprise which is slowly suffocating Blockbuster. Blockbuster has had a stranglehold on the video rental industry for so long they got complacent. Now their kingdom is falling. Falling, I say.

It occurs to me that NetFlix, or some similar service, probably does not exist elsewhere in the world. Let me explain.

NetFlix is an Internet service whereby one creates a movie queue online, from a database of tens of thousands of titles. The top three movies in the queue are then delivered posthaste to your residence.

Oddly, these movies seem to arrive from, and return to the NetFlix hive more expeditiously than regular mail. I'm suspicious that NetFlix has funded a very powerful lobby to assure that postal workers handle their packages twice as quickly as they do anything else.

You are provided with a return envelope, and may keep up to three movies for as long as you wish. When you've finished one, you simply drop it in the mailbox, and in about four days the next movie in your queue arrives. And all for $21 per month! But if you underutilize the service, you're just pissing away cash. So tread carefully.

New York was hot today. Very, very hot. Worst of all, it was humid. This is typical of the Northeast from June to August, and takes some getting used to. Still, I'd rather be hot than cold and sneazy.

Thankfully, the sky just opened and washed away the heat. And the party on the roof deck outside our window as well. The well-heeled attendees did not look as relieved as Foxy and I felt. Oh well.

Your Color Guide to Wedding Flowers

That's the cover feature of Bride's Magazine, Special Edition, Summer 2004. The magazine is 450 glossy pages long and costs $7.00. Did the editors actually consider that there might be somebody, somewhere in America who would glance at it and pass it over if they had left out the word color?

"But what if the pictures aren't in color?! I just can't take that risk again; I'm going with Weddingbells Magazine instead."

What's even more interesting is the lead-in, which reads: 20-Page Exclusive. Exclusive? Has Bride's Magazine really cornered the market on color guides to wedding flowers? I suppose it's possible. I've been really out of touch with the state of the industry for a long time now.

On a more somber note, the front page of the New York Times has this headline: Suicide Attack Kills at Least 22 in Kirkuk. I have this nagging suspicion that things aren't going as well in Iraq as our leaders would have us believe. It seems like almost everyday that the world is slapped in the face by some variation of this headline.

Donald Rumsfeld, ever the optimist, stated unequivocally that "the insurgency would be defeated." The only encouraging part of that statement is that he didn't call the insurgency "the evil-doers." So I guess there's some progress being made after all.

In America, if you're a real patriot, you get a 20-inch yellow-ribbon sticker with the words "Support Our Troops," which you're apparently supposed to put on your car, in as close proximity as possible to your wind-tattered nylon American flag. By the way, almost nothing screams Patriot at the Wheel! better than an exhaust-blackened nub of a flag that's been shredded by the elements.

Nothing, that is, except a giant sticker of an eagle carrying an apple pie that reads "PATRIOT AT THE WHEEL!" This hasn't been done yet, so I might be onto something...

Honestly, though, this is getting out of hand. Nobody is for their countrymen dying, but if you question the morality or legality of the war you are branded unpatriotic. I think it's patriotic to be unpatriotic right now, because if there wasn't dissent there'd be even more yellow ribbons everywhere, making us more intolerable in proportion.

So, the real question is which would you rather read about: Michael Jackson, or failure in Iraq? I think I'll stick to color guides to wedding flowers for the time-being.

High Highs, Low Lows

Michael Jackson was found innocent today of all charges of impairing the morals of diseased children and giving them Jesus Juice! This is great news because I don't think there is anybody left in America who can bear one more second of news coverage on this case.

In other news:

Today was a great day! I closed an account that I've been working on for a while, and believe that it will blossom into a very good relationship. It was actually the last of a series of happy (work-related) events that have peppered the last two weeks. I gained four new clients, all of whom are ideal in a lot of ways.

You see, there are two kinds of clients that a stockbroker can have: order-givers, and those who sincerely want and need advice. The latter are dramatically better.

For example, I have a few hot-shot, hyperactive, stock-trading clients who call up and yell at me what to buy or sell. These people will typically, and quite shamelessly, "chisel" me on the commission, then yell about something new altogether. They have no long-term plan to speak of, and never fill me in on what they're doing with their other brokers. This is infuriating, and often they are told to take their business elsewhere.

The other type of client will typically hand over all their investable assets to the firm, sit down with me to hammer out a disciplined plan for investing, then pay an annual fee to have their money managed. These people usually become dear acquaintances and are always very loyal.

Business has picked up dramatically for me this Spring, and is getting better. I always find that Spring and Summer are the best times of year to be working on Wall Street, because people have finally roused from Winter hibernation and allow themselves to become reengaged in their finances. They want to have meetings, give referrals, and add more money to their portfolios.

Interestingly, I think you'll find that many New Yorkers are assholes for at least five months of the year. Now that I think about it, this is typical of the entire Northeast corridor of the United States. With regard to New Yorkers, one may perceive this as a year-round affliction - but that has nothing to do with the weather. It's all relative when you live here.

Anyway, that's the nature of my business: It ebbs and flows with seasons and market cycles. When you have more business coming in than you can handle, you feel like you're on top of the world. But when it's slow, you can feel kind of useless. But I guess that's true of any business really.

It's just a matter of keeping things in perspective at all times, which I'm pretty good at.

Learning As I Go

Setting this blog up, in its basic form, was made very easy by the good people at Blogger.com.

Customizing it, however, has not been so easy. I wasn't aware that one had to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of HTML code to play around with the format. I thought it was going to be a click-and-drag type thing. Luckily, I was able to figure out the basic layout of the page by looking at the patterns in the code. I felt like John Nash, which is nice, because I usually never do.

When you're done laughing at me, feel free to offer me some help...

I welcome ANY advice or criticism about the layout or content of this blog.

So, I'm all alone on this Sunday morning. My fiancé, who instructed me that she would like to be known henceforth as Foxy Cleopatra, has gone out with her best friend. They're going to the beach on Long Island, New York. Then they're going to look for dresses for Foxy's bridesmaids. We're getting married in September!

A bit about Long Island:

Long Island is, as suggested by the name, a long island just east of Manhattan. The eastern quarter of the island, closest to Manhattan, is comprised of the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn. The remaining three-quarters are part of New York State, and are made up of numerous counties.

Long Island is a strange place, and people who live there enjoy saying that it's like its own country. It goes from very wealthy to very poor, and its residents from very clean-cut in their presentation to outrageously trendy. In any case, it is usually the first to absorb and affect the urban culture emanating from the boroughs of New York City. These styles are immediately transformed by the teens of the Island, and made very much they're own. Usually to bad effect.

For American readers outside of New York, you might know these people by their not-quite-right gangsta’ style - where something appears slightly off, but you can't quite put your finger on what it is. Or maybe you can, and it's characterized by an excess of ersatz urban machismo. In England and Scotland, I think these people would be known as chavs.

The Island is really beautiful though, the further out you go. Go far enough and you'll hit the Hamptons: Summer Playground for the Rich & Famous.

Anyway, I have to go eat lunch, straighten up the apartment, get some sunshine, and feed the dog. The dog, by the way, shall be known as the Urinator, due to her proclivity for pissing all over the place, but never where she should.

She keeps us on our toes.

Bye.

Post #1

Well...

This is far more nerve-wracking than I ever expected it to be. All of the sudden, I feel this enormous pressure to write something interesting or exciting - something appealing to the masses.

However, I just realized that most of the blogs I read are not interesting or exciting in any conventional way. They're interesting to me.

So, if you're interested in hearing about what it's like to live in New York, working on Wall Street, or about my new life with my bride-to-be, please stay tuned.

Here's the story:

I live in Manhattan, New York. For those of you who don't know, Manhattan is one of five boroughs that constitute New York City, along with The Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island. It is, by far, the finest borough, although Brooklyn is quickly gaining ground!

I work as a stockbroker on Wall Street. Wall Street simply refers to the general financial services of brokerage and investment banking. Only a lucky few people actually work on Wall Street the street. I say lucky because there are many venerable old buildings down there that hark back to Manhattan as the most powerful center of commerce and trade in the world, and it would be wonderful to work in one of them. If you're ever in New York, it's well worth exploring the Financial District.

I live right next to the Wall Street district in an area of Manhattan called Battery Park City. BPC is a nice area to live in, but it's completely artificial. BPC was created in the 60's with the dirt and rock and whatever else came out of the ground when the foundations were dug for the World Trade Center towers. Prior to that, it was just a long row of dilapidated piers. A retaining wall was created around the general area, and everything was dumped in there. As such, it is the newest section of Manhattan, with the majority of the buildings having been built in the 80's. There are five restaurants: Two are "english-style" pubs owned by one restaurant group, and the other three are Chinese restaurants owned by a second restaurant group. It's not good for quality when there's no competition, you can be sure.

So these are the basics of my life in New York. I'll keep you posted if anything interesting happens, although I suspect this is going to be a show about nothing, as Jerry and George put it.

Anyway, I have to run. Thanks for reading!