A Shocking Story of Discarded Peanut Shells

I was told by a friend who lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, about the throwing of trash into the air shaft outside her building. She told me that not only was there an accumulation of trash at the bottom, but also that many articles thrown out find their home on her window sills, air conditioner, etc.
On a recent visit to her apartment, I was able to look at and photograph the mess. She encouraged me to do so – documenting this would aid her in any action to remedy the situation.

She told me that the litter was not just the product of things dropped accidentally but also a deliberate throwing of goods. One of those committing the offense is the owner of the neighboring building, making it even more difficult to put a stop to this activity. Among the treasure trove was what appeared to be a used condom.
One often wonders what drives individuals to behave in such disgusting ways. Let me share with you a story that illustrates one man’s thinking.

I had a high school classmate whom I did not really know at the time I was attending school. Years later, he opened a shop in my hometown in Connecticut, which I began to frequent. I quickly saw that we had little in common, and I understood why we had different circles of friends in school that did not overlap. As I would learn, however, his values were much further from mine than I could imagine.

There are always at least a few common interests between any two people, so on my visits shopping at his store, I would have a chat. We maintained a casual acquaintance. As one is sometimes inclined to do, I extended an open invitation to him to stay with me in New York City. The lure of this city is great, and the prospect of a free stay in town is, for many, too much to resist. So, one day, Bob took me up on my offer, and I found him at my doorstep.

In the time he stayed in my home, he developed a romantic interest with a friend whom I had introduced him to. On one trip to my hometown to visit family, this friend asked to come along to visit Bob.
I don’t recall why, but they stayed at a cheap motel for that weekend. On my return to New York City, I stopped to pick up my friend. When I entered the room, I witnessed a scene that, to me, was quite shocking.

Both were dressed and ready to go. Bob, however, was lying clothed on the bed, eating shelled peanuts from a bag. As he ate and conversed, he would take the shells and deliberately throw them one by one on the floor. When I say deliberately, I mean just that. Not dropping them or trying to throw them in a receptacle, but throwing them some distance with GLEE. A pile of shells and debris had formed, and he seemed quite pleased.

When I confronted him, he responded with one of the most shocking things I have heard in my life. I asked him why he was doing this and, even though he was in a motel with maids, didn’t he feel badly about making such a mess on purpose? And he said:

“That’s what you pay for.”

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I have been told that in Switzerland, people will always wait for a walk light, even in a small rural town at an intersection with no visible traffic in any direction.

I have been told that in California, if a pedestrian steps into a street, cars will stop.

I will tell you that as a New Yorker, it’s every man or woman for himself or herself. Cars, regardless of laws or unfair size advantage, will compete with you for the roadway and will nearly run you down. And, traffic or not, we run through intersections without walk lights in our favor and dodge traffic.

In addition to issues of impatience waiting for walk lights, we also have a condition here of such severe crowds on the sidewalks, that many resort to walking in the curb or even in the roadway itself. Bicyclists are also aggressive. For some, these brazen acts of pedestrian and vehicular defiance confer Street Cred.

In 1998, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, as part of his Quality of Life campaign, decided to initiate a crackdown on jaywalking. This short-lived effort was rather laughable and barely enforced, with only 99 tickets being issued that year. New York City is not Singapore.

The reckless attitude of motorists towards pedestrians does not end with civilians. Police can also be rather overzealous. In Washington Square Park, for example, many are displeased with the rather aggressive habits of many officers speeding through narrow pedestrian walkways inside the park.

In the 1970s, my girlfriend was arrested for kicking a police car with her roller skates. An altercation had occurred between a police officer and a skater who was tapping electricity from a lamppost to power his boombox for playing music for roller skaters. A chase ensued, backup police were called, and a police vehicle came careening recklessly into the park, nearly hitting pedestrians. My girlfriend, furious at the near hit, kicked and dented the squad car with her skates and was arrested along with the perpetrator.

Ever the city of opportunity and opportunists, here on the highways, in moving traffic with little clearance, we have sellers of fruit, flowers, and water. I rarely need the flowers or water, but now I regret not having purchased a bag of fruit.* It would have made a nice snack, perhaps a quick chat with the vendor, and not have left me with a story about nothing 🙂

*I believe the fruit is Melicoccus bijugatus, grown over a wide area of the tropics, including South and Central America, Mexico, the Caribbean, parts of Africa and the Pacific. It is called Spanish lime, chenette, guaya, guinea, genip, genipe, quenepa, mamoncillo, mamón, ackee, skinnip, kenepa, xenepa, canapé, knippa, limoncillo, anoncillo, or honeyberry.

Related Posts: Hearts of Palm, Bygones Be Bygones, Durian

I recall seeing physicist Michio Kaku speaking against nuclear power after the Three Mile Island incident. His central argument was that the risk was too great and that nuclear power was an UNFORGIVING technology. Whether or not someone agrees with his assessment, in a world where forgiveness is the hallmark of the loving person, unforgiving is a very powerful word.

Life is a fragile business, and nothing illustrates that more than living in New York City. Better have all your ducks in row or you will will find yourself on the street rapidly – New York City is an unforgiving environment. I’ve written numerous times about this city’s revolving door nature. They come and they go – only the hardy survive the Sieve of Darwin.

It is remarkable that such a place as New York City could feel like home to anyone. There is opportunity to make a nest here and have intimate relations with neighbors and merchants. One can find places to relax, even experience nature’s bounty. I seek these respites from urban assault and have featured many of these places in these pages. It is a great city, and there are many great and generous people. But there is a decided edge here, and all these things require work. Dwanna learned that very quickly, and Duffy explained what was needed quite well.

However, a seasoned New Yorker’s antenna is always up and radar active. I have been conditioned at a core level and permanently rewired. I can fall asleep on a park bench or the subway, but the carrying strap of my bag is woven through crossed arms. I do occasionally walk at night alone on quiet streets, ever wary of those around me. Yes, New York is much safer now, but make no mistake, crime exists in large numbers. In 2010 there were 536 murders, 1,370 rapes, 19,359 robberies, 17,054 assaults, 18,695 burglaries and 38,136 grand larcenies. I lock my car doors everywhere I go, even in a driveway in the suburbs. Even with doors locked, many have returned to their vehicles to be rewarded with an Urban Coral Atoll and No Radio.

Here on the Metro-North in the Bronx at the Spuyten Duyvil stop on a hot humid Sunday with virtually no one in sight, I caught this sign framed against the Henry Hudson Bridge spanning Spuyten Duyvil creek to Manhattan. To New York it says – a sight I have seen often. To me, it means home. But it also a warning sign: Unforgiving, Ye Who Enter Here…

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The Wicked Witch of the West is exactly my type of woman. She always carries an umbrella and dreads water.*

I grew up very rarely drinking water. This is so puzzling to many, but I have a hypothesis. My parents, growing up poor, saw water as the drink of those unable to afford milk. Of course, once we reached a certain age, we were told that milk was no longer needed for growth, leaving us with nothing to drink. See?

When dying of thirst, I do drink things like carbonated beverages or fruit juices. Excepting in restaurants, I can never bring myself to drink water, and if suggested, the prospect seems so distasteful and unsatisfying. Better just to avoid the entire dilemma – I often go most of the day without drinking.

I have one friend who has the same camel-like character. Our shared dislike of drinking water and ability to go long stretches without drinking has been a bond and great source of private jokes.

Today, a water bottle seems to be de rigueur for young people. It is a standard accoutrement – bags are manufactured with mesh holders for water bottles. Observe anyone under 30, and a water bottle is not too far away.

Any good thing is marketed to death. Water and even the concept of drinking itself are the targets of promotion. There are proponents of superhydration, where copious amounts of water are consumed in a day – a gallon or more. Inconceivable to me.

I don’t care much for water getting on me either, and there’s nothing like an umbrella as a weapon against precipitation. In the suburbs, where transport and shelter is never far away, umbrellas do not have the importance that they do in a city like New York, where walking the streets is the norm. I do like showers, swimming and the beach, but I really dislike getting wet when clothed. It is so obviously repellent to me that I have often been asked, “Do you think that you are going to melt?” To which I always reply, “yes.”

So many questions I am asked about my aqueous dislikes. Things I would never have to explain to the Wicked Witch of the West, who shares my feelings about nature’s Rain of Terror 🙂

*It is never clearly explained why the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz is killed by water being dumped on her. There is much speculation, but most who have investigated this question believe that the witch’s dryness is what led her to melt when doused with water. The best hint seems to be a passage from the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum:

The Witch did not bleed where she was bitten, for she was so wicked that the blood in her had dried up many years before.

Photo Note: This photo was taken at 50th Street and Lexington Avenue looking northeast.

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I’m going to tell you a few things most New Yorkers are not going to admit to outsiders. Many of the bad things you have heard about this city are true. People move out, are happy to leave and don’t come back. I am not talking about dabblers, I am talking about tried and true, dyed in the wool, born and bred, loved it to death, New Yorkers. And many who visit here often or commute here daily, love the city and have the means to settle here do not chose to do so.

Why am I telling you this? Because this site is not a foil – it is not a veiled marketing campaign for New York City. There’s a stoic pride in surviving here. Many New Yorkers hate the city as much as they love it – it’s a love/hate thing.

New York is touted as one of the safest cities in the United States, on a per capita basis. This is misleading since crime rates are averaged across all boroughs and neighborhoods. In reality, many neighborhoods have very high crime rates. Many a suburb or smaller city is unlikely to see the tremendous disparity in crime rates across neighborhoods and thus averaging rates outside the big cities gives a better indication of what someone might experience than doing so in a place like New York. Also, big cities under report crime and many laws are not enforced here that would be elsewhere. Vandalism and theft is a constant.

I personally have come back home to see Bleecker Street cordoned off because of a murder with open firing on the streets. I have witnessed someone pulling a gun out and firing it. I have been burglarized more than once. I have been held up at gunpoint. I see drug dealers daily. I witnessed a fight on Broadway in daylight between a man with a knife and one with a chain which was fortunately stopped by an attorney carrying a gun. I have had my car broken into with the entire rear window of a hatchback smashed into pieces. Meaningless anecdotal evidence? Hardly. The sarcasm and cynicism of New Yorkers, seen in comics like David Letterman or Woody Allen, are testimony to the fact that edgy is a word based on the harsh reality of the city life, not just a term used to describe style.

Most people who have made a large personal investment coupled with self sacrifice are not eager to own up to New York City’s shortcomings, failings and problems. Because in a way, to do so is an admission that perhaps a person has made a poor decision to live here – who is courageous enough to admit that? Don’t believe the politicians who have an incentive to promote New York and are often chaperoned, escorted or chauffeured daily.

I am also not going to bring out the cliches like New York is the greatest city in the world. Saying it does not make it so. I would not want to engage in a contest with cities like San Francisco, Paris, Venice or London. The city has become too expensive for most. Much has been over gentrified. National chains dominate retail – one has to hunt more to ferret out the special places that made New York great.

And then there are quality of life issues, one of the biggest reason that many leave. The city is crowded, dirty and noisy. See one woman lose control in my story Mad as Hell. Natural oases have to be sought out. Although culture, restaurants and services abound, many of life’s simple chores are extraordinarily difficult – laundry, biking, transporting things too large to carry, driving, parking, grocery shopping or even having to walk up six flights of stairs several times per day to get home. Services and conditions in many of the city’s apartment buildings can be abominable – steam heat that can not be adjusted, inadequate ventilation, the roar of window air conditioners and intercoms that never work. This is not necessarily the realm of the low rent tenant – many very expensive apartments have the same poor conditions.

New York is fundamentally a town where everyone has to walk to some degree. There are those who love walking and those who don’t. I have stated personally and on these pages how walking is one of the great joys of New York City, however, not in blistering heat with high humidity. Our recent heat wave is evidence of one of the grimmest times in this city. I look down Broadway and I know that many in that crowd are very uncomfortable, angry and in more ways than one, are members of the Steaming Masses of New York…

Related Posts: Hell, Mad as Hell, Mad as Hell 2, The Dark Ages, Unguent.

What are the chances of finding an object whose function it is to apportion chances? I found this die sitting on a park bench, crying out to be photographed. The six outcomes seemed to speak well to chances of success in life, although it did not weigh the outcomes to accurately reflect the chances of success and failure in New York City.

I was once speaking to a friend of an employee in my office. He appeared to be quite irritated and frustrated by my outlook relative to his. He apparently was steeped in workshops and readings which promoted ideas of positive thinking and affirmations. But, in spite of a positive outlook, success for him was Outlook Negative. On the other hand, he saw me as being rather negative, but my die was turning up Outlook Positive.

I explained that I was actually a very enthusiastic person, tenacious and optimistic, but with, however, a very strong dosage of realism. I don’t believe in spending time using positive affirmations – saying it does not make it so and as everyone has heard, the road to success is paved with failure. The real estate at the top is very crowded, despite the disingenuous messages of the late night self help and get rich quick evangelists that buying their product will insure success – It Is Certain. After receiving it, any reasonable person will see that it Cannot Be Certain. When it comes to predictives of success, we live in a world of Insufficient Data or Data Error and the only solution is to Retry.

Immigrants and transplants to New York City are risk takers by nature. However, although I have had a history of perhaps taking more risk than others, I never liked it and often dreamed of a lifestyle with less risk. I had a very insightful conversation with a woman with whom I was discussing my aversion to risk – that I had been self-employed my entire life, yet the inherent uncertainty of being in business in New York City was always somewhat stressful to me. In response, she made a very poignant remark about how I reminded her of her husband who had once said: “I should have been a baker. You buy your sugar and flour in the morning and sell cookies in the afternoon.”

As attractive as this pearl of wisdom may appear, in New York City, becoming a baker may minimize potential loss, but will not guarantee success. The demise of iconic bakeries, Vesuvio and Zito makes abundantly clear what every business owner knows. There are many elements to business success, and minimizing inventory with high turnover is only part of the equation. There’s fierce competition, startup costs, changing tastes and in the city, extremely high rents. It’s still a roll of the dice, because it will takes lots of customers and no matter how much or little sugar and flour you buy in the morning, you may never sell enough cookies in the afternoon 🙂

There is nothing that seems more unproductive than time spent on precautionary measures. A token gesture here and there is perhaps tolerable, but time spent on any tedious, methodical practice feels like time better spent elsewhere. Prevention and insurance are contrary to human nature – and with good reason. Most will never really experience a catastrophic event, so why not take a chance and save time and/or money?

Professionals dealing with disaster, repairs and medical emergencies know these things all too well – a mixed bag for them I am sure, since their livelihood depends on the misfortune (and hopefully repair) of others. Fortunately, they also understand that the moment of crisis is no time for lectures – everyone is well aware of what should have been done.

On Saturday morning, April 2, 2011, my laptop had a complete hard drive failure. This was where I do all my work for this website and store files and images going back over 10 years, both personal and for New York Daily Photo.

I do regular backups, but not regularly enough and I do them manually. Manual backups are very tricky propositions because these require that rare trait of unfailing routine and discipline. For computer backups, better to go with an automated solution, taking the human element out of the equation entirely. Apple makes an excellent, sophisticated product for backup called Time Machine (included with every Mac), which can be custom configured by the user for scheduled backups and direct them to wherever and whatever device the user desires. This software utility will save and restore an exact mirror of a computer’s contents right down to placement of icons on the desktop.

I had started to set this up when I purchased my laptop in 2008, but because I was unable to configure wirelessly to my satisfaction, I left the project for “another time.” I had fallen victim to one of my customary habits, best summarized by one of my favorite adages: don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.*
I already have had two good computer scares which I wrote about: Foolish Crash on 12/11/2007 and Not Good At All on 12/21/2009. The 2009 event should have been the ideal lesson – frightening but where there is little or no loss.

Fortunately, I am in New York City, where there are a myriad of service centers and individuals specializing in Apple computers. But who to choose on a Saturday morning? Some online reviews, and I was off to Dr. Brendan’s computer repair. I had a nervous afternoon and finally received a phone call – the drive was restored. However, some of the files were corrupted – the technician had already worked after closing time and I was given my drive in a portable enclosure to take home with the task of examining and backing up files. In another near miraculous scenario, all the new files for which I had no backup were retrieved and for all the files corrupted, I had backups! With some hours of file comparison, I was able to rebuild the drive and external backups of every file and folder.

I hope you do not succumb to instinct but instead, listen to reason. Do not wait for a better time or, like me, a better solution. because le mieux est l’ennemi du bien 🙂

*This saying is attributed to Voltaire, from La Bégueule (1772):
Dans ses écrits, un sage italien? dit que
le mieux est l’ennemi du bien

Literally, le mieux est l’ennemi du bien translates as the best is the enemy of the good, but more typically as the perfect is the enemy of the good.

A Door Drama

I have shared many stories of the good and remarkable I have found in the people of this city. I have recounted very few tales of rude or hostile behavior, not in an effort to distort the city’s image, but in order not to focus on negativity. The media does a more than adequate job of covering hostile or criminal acts in New York City. In fairness, however, if we really had to do a study, I am sure that the rudeness quotient would be much higher in New York City than in a rural or suburban environment. A small incident yesterday serves as an apt example.

Upon arriving at my office building midday, I was met with a woman engrossed in something in front of the door. The entrance way has two doors, only one of which is available for access in and out. Let us even grant that she did not know this. She was standing only inches in front of the doorway where I had to enter. You can see this in today’s photo. She made no effort to move at all. It was raining, but she could have easily just moved a couple feet in front of the adjoining door. I did not excuse myself, expecting that as I opened the door against her back, she would become aware of the situation and certainly move. Perhaps even offer the obligatory and insincere “I’m sorry.” But no.

I opened the door no more than 12 inches and SQUEEZED through the opening. Apparently desensitized to humanity and anything around her, she did not move at all – it was a case of rudeness to the point of obliviousness. I turned to look at her from the back as I waited for the elevator. She was in the same position, unaware of the incident and that she was still blocking the entrance to an office building.

In the business environment, particularly business to business sales, New York City can be hostile, even with well-articulated policies of apparent rudeness, such as a sign posted on a door stating: “NO STUDENTS AFTER 1 PM” – see the story here. Admittedly, with the hordes of people in such a large city, brusque behavior towards others can easily develop. However, it is not a fait accompli, and many businesses with the same streetside exposure to masses of shoppers do not become hostile to their customers. New York City just demands a little more effort to stay on the polite side of the line.

Typically, I would become quite irritated by an experience such as this door drama. However, I now view any extreme acts, whether kindness or rudeness, as an opportunity for my writing. Using this website as a forum, the negative incidents can be defused through public ventilation and discourse. At the same time, on occasion, it provides an opportunity to illuminate New York’s more extreme behaviors and, Rather than Respond with Road Rage, to just Report these Random Acts of Rudeness…