I went for a walk in the East Village last night around 2:00am. It's always fun to walk sober around a neighborhood full of dive bars that late on a Saturday. Hordes of drunken dudes in jeans and black shoes, hysterical women in patent heels screaming into cell phones, couples hovering on the corner waving frantically for a cab, shivering: they make for some pretty great people watching. A visibly drunk driver careened through an intersection, blasting his horn the entire way. A Latina in a red dress crawled along the ground, searching for something tiny, while a cop aimed his flashlight at the sidewalk and chatted with her boyfriend.
Last night reminded me of a walk I took a couple of years ago, soon after I moved to New York. I wrote this email to a friend on January 6, 2007:
It was 72 degrees in New York City this afternoon. I woke up late, watched Tech upset Duke, then went for a walk, south, towards Tompkins Square Park.
The park has two enclosed areas called dog runs, where dogs can shoot the breeze without wearing a leash. One is for big dogs, over 30 pounds, and the other is for little ones. In the little run, I watched one dog fuck another dog while one of the owners took pictures on his camera phone. The photographer was wearing shorts.
As I meandered through the park, the wind shifted and I smelled a pine tree 20 feet away. Two twentysomething girls walked by and one of them said "what I'd like to do is stick it up his little punk rock butt."
I went over to Avenue C, aka Avenida Loisaida, and continued south, warm. As I crossed 5th street, two boys, probably 10 years old, overtook me. As they passed, one of them said "he's a asshole."
"Yeah," the other agreed. "A real ASS hole."
Down in the Lower East Side, I ate a bagel and read your text message. Moments later I heard two kids yelling from their 4th story window at a third kid down on the street. They were trying to convince him to go down some stairs into a bodega's underground storage room. In the alley across the street, an ancient woman carefully hung laundry over the railing of her wrought iron balcony.
So I went home, made some penne a la vodka, and watched football all night on my 99 foot TV.
Last night reminded me of a walk I took a couple of years ago, soon after I moved to New York. I wrote this email to a friend on January 6, 2007:
It was 72 degrees in New York City this afternoon. I woke up late, watched Tech upset Duke, then went for a walk, south, towards Tompkins Square Park.
The park has two enclosed areas called dog runs, where dogs can shoot the breeze without wearing a leash. One is for big dogs, over 30 pounds, and the other is for little ones. In the little run, I watched one dog fuck another dog while one of the owners took pictures on his camera phone. The photographer was wearing shorts.
As I meandered through the park, the wind shifted and I smelled a pine tree 20 feet away. Two twentysomething girls walked by and one of them said "what I'd like to do is stick it up his little punk rock butt."
I went over to Avenue C, aka Avenida Loisaida, and continued south, warm. As I crossed 5th street, two boys, probably 10 years old, overtook me. As they passed, one of them said "he's a asshole."
"Yeah," the other agreed. "A real ASS hole."
Down in the Lower East Side, I ate a bagel and read your text message. Moments later I heard two kids yelling from their 4th story window at a third kid down on the street. They were trying to convince him to go down some stairs into a bodega's underground storage room. In the alley across the street, an ancient woman carefully hung laundry over the railing of her wrought iron balcony.
So I went home, made some penne a la vodka, and watched football all night on my 99 foot TV.
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