Memories of 9/11, Ten Years Later

September 11, 2011 by

It’s just impossible to believe that it’s been ten years, that a kid could be a young teenager and not remember what life was like before.

Everyone has memories of that day. Here are three of mine:

1.  Sending Tom Off on the Plane

Early on that Tuesday morning in September, I sent one of my best friends off in a cab to JFK to send him back to LA.  Tom had come to visit for a college reunion we were having up in Maine, so he’d come in about a week earlier so that we could drive up together.  While we were there, he broke his wrist badly diving for a softball, and spent most of Monday seeing doctors while I traveled around trying to get him some medication for the pain.  His intention had been to stay for the week for a job interview, but the doctors recommended he have surgery as soon as possible, and he wanted to do the surgery back in LA.

So that Tuesday morning, he got in a cab bound for JFK.  About two hours later, I watched as the second of two planes hit the World Trade Center, and heard of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.  It wasn’t until early afternoon that I found out that he wasn’t on any of them. His flight was diverted to St. Louis, where he sat with that broken wrist for most of the next week while the air traffic was shut down.  But for most of that day, I assumed he was gone.

2.  Walking the Streets

Once the enormity of the tragedy became clear, a mass exodus started out of the city.  The streets were closed to traffic, so people just simply walked. My wife, then my girlfriend, worked in midtown, but we got in touch with each other through AOL Instant Messenger and worked out that we’d meet in Columbus Circle and I’d walk her to my place.

So I left my apartment and started walking south, mostly against a massing crowd of people who were all going north, away from Ground Zero.  Some of them were Manhattanites, on what would be a two or three mile hike, and some of them were from points even further north — the Bronx, even Westchester.  What else could they do?  Some of them had no place to stay, many of them just wanted to get as far away as they could, and there were no cars, no cabs, no transit.  So they walked, all of them quiet, some of them crying, some of them covered in the ashes of the fallen buildings.

As I walked south, getting on 11AM or so, two hours after the first tower fell, I could see stores shutting down for the day, maybe the week.  The local Starbucks was closed, a hand-drawn “sad face” making the announcement.  The open stores were mostly empty, because who would be shopping?  The only people doing any business were the grocery stores, bulging with people stocking up on supplies for what they expected might be a near siege of the city.

But as I walked, I came across the peculiar sight of one retail store doing a booming business, with people lined up out the door.  It was a shoe store, and I was momentarily puzzled wondering why people would be buying shoes at a time like this.  Then I realized that all the people on line were women.  Women who had already walked miles on their high heels, and were desperate to get some comfortable shoes for the long road ahead.

3.  The Friday Vigil

I remember that first week after in kind of a blur.  Looking back, it’s almost like it happened in a dream. I remember getting back to work on Thursday, following the mayor’s encouragement that we should all get back to our lives.  It was ridiculously too early to be back at work. At the time, I was teaching at Fordham Law School, and I got maybe 10 minutes into the class before I simply stopped, seeing the looks on the faces of students who were simply not prepared to discuss property law.  So we just talked about how everyone was feeling, how we were holding up.

That Friday, I remember that people started a spontaneous movement to hold a candlelight vigil at sunset throughout the country in memory of the lost.  My now-wife and I joined the vigil, going down to the front steps of our brownstone and then walking the two blocks, holding our candles, to the fire station on 83rd street, which had lost one of its firemen.

When we arrived, there was already a crowd up front. It was an electic crowd, a mix of the Upper West Side residents of the area and what seemed like a group of friends and family of the fallen firefighter.  As we got there, a man with a guitar was playing a folk tune, many in the crowd singing along. But not the whole crowd. What he was singing was “If I had a Hammer,” a Pete Seeger progressive anthem about the “hammer of justice” and the “bell of freedom,” first sung in support of men prosecuted for advocating the overthrow of the country. And the people singing along were a group of residents, reconstructed lefties, stereotypically former hippies, seemingly oblivious to the monstrously inappropriate gesture of singing a 60s protest song at the vigil for a firefighter killed in a terrorist attack.

The rest of the people, there because of a personal loss, not because they read something on the internet about walking around with a candle, seemed puzzled, not because they knew the historic implications of the song, but more just a reaction to its cheery tempo.  But they clearly felt something was amiss, so when the song ended, up started a very different type of anthem started ringing out — chants of “USA, USA, USA” started by a little boy, maybe eight or nine.  So now it was the residents’ turn to feel a little uncomfortable, as the sound of the martial chant, equally as inappropriate as a 60s protest song, filled the streets.

I remember thinking in that moment about how people could have such remarkably divergent reactions to the same tragedy.  And I thought about that moment many times in the years that followed, as we saw those two perspectives become increasingly polarized in the governmental response to what happened that day.

Filed Under: Best of, Living in Manhattan Tagged With:

Earthquakes, Hurricanes, What Else Do You Got?

September 3, 2011 by

My parking garage after the hurricane.

An unmoored boat, not mine for once, beached on the rocks by the Nyack pier.

 

First an earthquake, and now a hurricane.  Been an interesting August.

We rode out the hurricane okay.  I know we weren’t supposed to leave our home and all, but a friend was having a birthday party Saturday, and, well, the hurricane wasn’t expected to really arrive until later that night, so we went.  I mean, after writing a few weeks ago about how tough New Yorkers are, I couldn’t very well blow off a party for a little wind and rain.

I was certainly glad to be out of the city for something like this, though.  That was a little scary, some of the warnings that were being made. I’m thinking that in a natural disaster, you pretty much want to be in a place where you aren’t in a big tall building surrounded by other big tall buildings, and where you have a car that you can use to escape if the disaster turns into the apocalypse.

That said, I don’t have the classic suburban home. I’m up in a condo at the top of a tall building, poised to fall right into the Hudson should anything really bad happen.  Even better, pretty much all my walls are made of glass.  The glass is much better for checking out the river views, but much, much worse for your state of mind when they’re getting rocked by 75 mph winds.  You know what it sounds like when a hurricane hits a wall of glass, 200 feet above the ground?  I do.  Not good.  Not good at all.

But we made it through. No real damage, a little flooding in our garage but we were able to move the cars to higher ground.  The worst part was climbing stairs again, a reminder from my old days in my Manhattan walkup.  No way I was taking an elevator with the risk of the power going out (it eventually did for a day or so), making me one of those light-hearted news features about the schmuck who spent three days trapped drinking his own urine to survive.  So the stairs it is!

Hope everyone is okay.  Keep a watch out for the locusts.  And if you’re a first-born son like me, you might want to keep an eye on your front door. 

Filed Under: Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs

Thoughts on Yesterday’s Earthquake, and Why New Yorkers are Tougher Than Everyone Else

August 23, 2011 by

I don’t know about you, but I felt the earth move.  Har!

How about that? An earthquake.  In New York. That’s something new for all of us.

Now, I have another reason to be glad that I moved to the suburbs — namely, if we’re going to start having earthquakes in a big, dense city made up of buildings that were never built to withstand earthquakes, then I certainly feel that I made a pretty good trade.  Being able to get good ethnic food is wonderful and all, but not when the walls start trembling.

That said, I’m not particularly safe here in my condo in Nyack, on the eight floor of a building that I’m pretty sure what constructed on landfall.  A couple of good shakes, and I’ll be sleeping with the fishies.  That’s why I was a little freaked out yesterday, and encouraged my wife to get the heck out of the condo and take a walk or something.  I don’t even know that my insurance coverage protects me from earthquakes.  Probably something I should check.

It’s really monstrously unfair to subject New Yorkers to earthquakes, on top of everything else that they (sadly, that used to be “we”) have to deal with. I’ve always thought that New Yorkers are simply tougher than everyone else, by the sheer necessity of dealing with all the daily outrages and irritations that you have to put up with when you live in crowded, noisy city.

New Yorkers just deal.  Summers are too hot.  Winters are too cold.  You take a cab, you sit in traffic, you take the subway, you stand packed together next to someone who could easily be a serial killer. You live in a jail cell. Crazy people everywhere. Everyone in a rush, bumping into each other.  Snow, hail, sleet, hurricanes, blackouts — we get it all, and we just keep going to work.  Assholes dropped two fucking PLANES on our city, and we were all back at our desks two days later.  We DEAL.

No one else has to deal with all that stuff.  People who live in LA, for example, are like veal, sensitive and temperamental.  It’s so beautiful every day, they get freaked out with any change in their routine.  I’ve been in LA on rainy days, it’s like everyone’s afraid to be outside. They can’t drive.

So the fact that people in LA were sneering at our response to the earthquake was a little irritating. Yes, the idea of the buildings gave us a little pause.  Something new and surprising.  So people hurried out of the buildings, and some people got the rest of the day off.  But today?  Back to work.  Like always.

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , ,

In the News: Are Young People Going to Abandon Cities for the Suburbs?

August 6, 2011 by

We’ve previously discussed the debate concerning the future of the suburbs: specifically, whether young people are turning toward, or away, from suburban life in favor of a more urban experience.  On the one side, the Brookings Institute put out a white paper positing that traditional “white flight” from the cities to the suburbs was evolving into “bright flight” from the suburbs to the city — young people fleeing the suburbs to become part of the urban core. On the other side, we’ve seen pushback from some analysts pointing to Census data that actually supports the opposite argument, that young people are actually choosing to migrate to the suburbs.

Here’s Joel Kotkin in a piece that he published on his NewGeography site, which which was republished in Forbes, entitled  “Why America’s Young and Restless Will Abandon Cities for Suburbs”:

Some demographers claim that “white flight” from the city is declining, replaced by a “bright flight” to the urban core from the suburbs. “Suburbs lose young whites to cities,” crowed one Associated Press headline last year.

Yet evidence from the last Census show the opposite: a marked acceleration of movement not into cities but toward suburban and exurban locations. The simple, usually inexorable effects of maturation may be one reason for this surprising result. Simply put, when 20-somethings get older, they do things like marry, start businesses, settle down and maybe start having kids.

An analysis of the past decade’s Census data by demographer Wendell Cox shows this. Cox looked at where 25- to 34-year-olds were living in 2000 and compared this to where they were living by 2010, now aged 35 to 44. The results were surprising: In the past 10 years, this cohort’s presence grew 12% in suburban areas while dropping 22.7% in the core cities. Overall, this demographic expanded by roughly 1.8 million in the suburbs while losing 1.3 million in the core cities.

***

These findings should inform the actions of those who run cities. Cities may still appeal to the “young and restless,” but they can’t hold millennials captive forever. Even relatively successful cities have turned into giant college towns and “post-graduate” havens — temporary way stations before people migrate somewhere else. This process redefines cities from enduring places to temporary resorts.

This is a really interesting debate, so we’ll continue to track it.  I think part of the divide depends on what you mean by “young people.”  The “bright flight” argument, to the extent that it points out the obvious tendency of unmarried, childless people in their 20s to move to cities, seems self-evident.  But the responding point, that those same people start to move to the suburbs in their 30s, seems equally self-evident.  That is, is anything really changing?

Put it this way: you could not have kept me in the suburbs when I was in my 20s if you pulled a gun on me.  For most of the last 20 years, in fact, I lived in cities even though I inexplicably kept getting jobs in the suburbs: I lived in Manhattan when I had a clerkship in Uniondale, Long Island; I lived in San Francisco when I was in graduate school in Palo Alto; and I lived in Manhattan for over 10 years while I taught in Brooklyn (technically, okay, not a suburb) and then started working in the Hudson Valley.

But over time, I not only found myself losing friends to the suburbs, but realizing that the things that were keeping me in the city were things that were becoming less a vital part of my life, and that I could have an easier life (particularly for me, who actually did a reverse commute) if I just gave in and move to the suburbs.

Which means I went through the exact process described by Kotkin: urban in my 20s, then moving to the suburbs as I got older.

To paraphrase an old quote from Winston Churchill: “If you’re not living in the city at twenty you have no heart, if you’re not living in the suburbs at forty you have no brain.”

Filed Under: News, Suburbs versus Cities Tagged With: , ,

Does Having a Dog Prepare You For Having a Kid?

July 15, 2011 by

I’ve written before how all my parent friends are enjoying themselves right now at the news that we’re going to have a kid. Most of them had kids years ago, and they’re getting a lot of kicks out of the idea of me becoming a father at 44.  “Oh, it’s going to be so hard.”  “What a big change.”  Stuff like that.

So just to mess with them, I keep shrugging it off, telling them that it’s no big deal.  After all, I have a dog.  That’s pretty much the same thing.

Oh, how they hate that.  They start sputtering: “Outrageous!  How can you compare having a dog to having a kid?!?”  Okay, people don’t exclaim “Outrageous!” anymore, but you catch my drift.

And I really am just messing with them.  I don’t think it’s the same thing, but I actually think that having a dog is good preparation for having a kid.  Just hear me out.

  • First, having a dog means that you get used to cleaning up someone’s poop. That’s a big step in a man’s life.  Once you’ve broken the seal on that, a little more poop isn’t going to make a difference.
  • Second, having a dog means that you have to feed something every day if you want to keep it alive. Plants? You can water them once in a while, whenever you remember.  Plants will deal.  You have to remember to feed the dog, just like you’ll have to remember to feed the baby.
  • Third, having a dog means that you’ve already lost your freedom, anyway.  It used to be we could decide to just go away for the weekend, literally at the last minute. Those days are done.  Can’t leave a dog alone at home for the weekend.

You see my point?  Same thing!  Piece of cake.

Okay, yes, I understand that a baby has a much higher degree of difficulty.  But I do think that any couple thinking of having kids should first think about getting a dog.  At the very least, if you find that you actually can’t keep a dog alive — if, for example, you run off to Atlantic City for the weekend and only remember that you have a dog when you smell his rotting carcass upon your return — then you probably should keep practicing good birth control.

Filed Under: Best of, Having a Dog in the Suburbs, Humor, My Life in the Suburbs, Parenting in the Suburbs Tagged With: ,

Does Living in the Suburbs Make You Healthier? Maybe for Some People….

June 20, 2011 by

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that suburbanites are actually healthier than people who live in either the city or in rural areas.

For many urban dwellers, the country conjures up images of clean air, fresh food and physical activities. But these days, Americans residing in major cities live longer, healthier lives overall than their country cousins—a reversal from decades past.

***

To be sure, city dwellers live with more air pollution and violent crime. They also have higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases and low-birth-weight babies and are more likely to drink excessively. But overall, urbanites tend to rate their own health more highly and are less likely to die prematurely than rural Americans, according to the county rankings report.

In many measures, residents of suburban areas are the best off. They generally rate their own health the highest and have the fewest premature deaths than either their urban or rural counterparts. Suburbanites also have the fewest low-birth-weight babies, homicides and sexually transmitted diseases.

The emphasis is mine, gloriously mine!  How about that?  Live in the city, and you’re more likely to drink excessively (very true, in my experience), and you’re less healthy from all the air pollution.

Move to the suburbs, though and you reduce your chances, according to the article,  having low-weight babies, getting murdered, and getting the pox.  That’s a pretty good tradeoff off for lousy Thai food, amirite???

Not that moving the suburbs has helped me at all, frankly.  That is, I have not gotten a sexually transmitted disease or been murdered or had a low-weight baby, so that’s good.  But it’s not like I’m exercising more than I did when I lived in the city, which is to say that I did virtually no exercise back then and I’ve continued that rigorous campaign now in the suburbs.  The only change is that I haven’t joined a gym yet, so my lack of exercising is free, a nice change from the city, where not-exercising at my local Crunch cost me like $75 a month.  I’ve put that $75 savings into more cigarettes and booze.

But just from reading that article, I feel healthier already….

Filed Under: Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, News, Suburbs versus Cities Tagged With: , ,

My Maiden Voyage: How Captain Idiot Busted Up His Boat, A Dock, and Almost Killed Two People and One Dog

June 18, 2011 by

Captain Idiot

Let me tell you about my first trip on the new boat.

So I get this boat.  It actually belonged to a friend of mine, who is a terrific boater and happens to be a mechanic.  He was selling it, and it made sense to buy (1) from someone I knew and trusted, (2) who was a mechanic, so he probably kept it in really good condition, and (3) from a friend who was willing to help teach me everything I needed to know about it.

And it’s a beautiful boat.  At 28 feet, it’s big enough to hold all the people that will now visit me in the suburbs so they can go on my boat.  It has two motors, which I figured was perfect because I would have a backup motor when I invariably busted a propeller.  And it has a cabin and a real bathroom, so my wife will actually come out with me.

So far so good.  Here’s the problem.  The day he delivered the boat to me, docking it at the condo complex, it was raining. We were supposed to go out so he could show me the ropes on how to drive (errr– pilot) it, but because of the rain we just skipped the lesson and figured we would do it sometime soon, BEFORE I ever took the boat out.

But then a week or so passed, and we couldn’t get our schedules together.  And it was an absolutely beautiful summer Saturday, and I just couldn’t wait any more.  How hard could it be?  You turn on the engine, you point the boat.  Simple.

So here’s what happened.  My wife and I packed a nice picnic lunch, grabbed the dog — because dogs love being out on the open water, right?? — and took down the cover of the boat, started undoing the ropes.  Being the master boater that I am, I remembered to turn on the blower before I started the engines, because otherwise the engine blows up or something.  That turns out to be the only smart thing I did all day.

The engines both start up. All the gauges and stuff by the captain’s chair seem to be working fine.  It’s a beautiful day. What a great moment!  Here I am, ready for my first trip out on my new boat.  I take a deep breath, tell my wife she can release the last rope holding us to the dock, and push the gear shift and throttle forward.

And the boat roars to life, zooms forward, and crashes into the dock across from me.

Okay, I should stop right here and explain something.  I’ve admitted before that I’m not a good boater, but I do have some experience. Unfortunately, my experience was always with boats that had a simple and intuitive engine set up. Namely, they had a “stick shift” that you basically pushed up to go forward and down to go in reverse.  One stick. Push it this way, go straight. Push it that way, go back.  Aim with the wheel.  Just like a car.  Very easy.  Very intuitive.

This boat is different.  Not only does it have two engines, but two DIFFERENT types of sticks.  One stick is the shifter, like the transmission, that you push up to go forward and back to go in reverse.  So far so good.  And then there’s another stick, the throttle, which controls the power — the further you push it, the faster you go.

That’s where it gets a little tricky.  Because, for example, let’s say that you just drove your new boat straight into a dock, and the boat is trying very hard to actually climb up the dock and use it as a ramp to free itself from the surly bonds of earth and fly gloriously into the air and into the waterfront condo 30 feet in front of you.  And let’s also say that your limited experience in boats has taught you the basic lesson that if you want to go in reverse, you just pull back on the stick.  So you do that, and it doesn’t help.  In fact, what happens is that you hear the almost cartoon-like pinging sounds of little pieces of your gears flying apart.

Why? Because in YOUR boat, the gear shift and the throttle are SEPARATE.  So to go in reverse, so that you’re no longer basically half out of the water and beached on this dock, you have to push BACK on the gear shift and FORWARD on the throttle.  Back on one stick, forward on the other.

Instead, what you did, in a blind sphincter-clenching panic with piss dripping down your leg, is instinctively pull back on everything.  Which you’re not supposed to do, because it strips the gears, just like what would happen if you decided to shift your car into reverse when you were going 55 miles an hour down the highway.  And then you’re basically screwed.

Back to our story.  Here I am, about four seconds into my first boat trip, and my boat has crashed into a dock, is halfway up in the air, and is aimed directly at one of my neighbor’s condo.  My wife is screaming at me, the dog is barking, the engines are roaring.  As far as I know, I’ve opened a gaping hole in the bottom of my boat, and we’re minutes away from sinking, all of us drowning about ten feet from shore.  I pull back on the engines, stripping the gears, but at least the engine stops roaring, and basic gravity drops us back into the water.

But now I don’t really have any maneuverability, what with the whole “my gear shift is now a molten pile of metal” thing.  So we start drifting around, desperately using the pilings to push ourselves around, trying to get into one of the slips so we can turn off the boat and I can commence with tying it to a dock, going home, having a drink, and never leaving my house again.

To make things even better, there’s a big crowd of people watching. My dock is right next to a public pier in Nyack, so there are like 30 people who were having a nice day hanging out on the pier and taking in the sights, now getting the treat of watching a dumbass destroy his boat.  The only good thing that happened to me that day was that none of those people were quick enough to pull out their smartphones, so I didn’t end up in a viral Youtube video.

So that was my first trip on the boat.  Four seconds of abject terror, followed by about five minutes of blinding humiliation, followed by an unending series of new and unprecedented bills: a bill to repair the gears, a bill to fix my neighbors dock, a bill for all the alcohol I’m going to need to forget that day.

The best day of my life can’t come soon enough.  Never buy a boat.

P.S.  The picture isn’t actually from that day, but it’s probably a fair representation of what I looked like.  I’m wearing the hat ironically, of course, or at least that’s what I tell people….

Filed Under: Best of, Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , ,

Who’s Moving to the Suburbs? More African-Americans, That’s Who!

May 29, 2011 by

Since I moved to the suburbs and started this blog, I’ve been trying to validate my decision by pointing out all the OTHER people who are ALSO moving to the suburbs.  For example, we’ve seen how Amy Winehouse moved to the suburbs, and then the Crips and the Bloods (that was a big day for us), and then immigrants in general.  We’ve also discussed the debate about whether people in general are still moving out to the suburbs, or whether they’re starting to go the other way.

But today, we have a report on a big “get” for our side: African-Americans:

Kendall Taylor grew up on this city’s tough South Side and is a pastor at Lodebar Church and Ministries in his old neighborhood. But he lives 35 miles away, in Plainfield, Ill.

“I didn’t want my children to grow up in the same environment I did,” says Taylor, 38, who bought a house in Plainfield with his wife Karen, 38, in 2007. They have one son, Jeremiah, who is 15. Taylor’s mom, sisters, nieces and nephews still live in Chicago. The youngsters, he says, “all want to come and live with me” in the quiet, but fast-growing suburb of about 40,000.

Taylor’s decision to live outside Chicago makes him part of a shift tracked by the 2010 Census that surprised many demographers and urban planners: He is among hundreds of thousands of blacks who moved away from cities with long histories as centers of African-American life, including Chicago, Oakland, Washington, New Orleans and Detroit.

(From USA Today) (emphasis added).

That’s right! The cool people, the ones who set the cultural trends for all the white people to follow.  They’re all moving out here, those traditionally lily-white suburbs that everyone in the city makes fun of.  Talk about validation!

This is sooo much better than Amy Winehouse.

Filed Under: News, Suburbs versus Cities, Who's Moving to the Suburbs? Tagged With: , ,

Why Do Parents Want You to Have Kids, Then Laugh at You When You Do?

May 25, 2011 by

Now that we’ve announced we’re going to be having a baby,  friends of ours keep giving us that whole, “oh boy, you don’t know what you’re in for” speech.

Have you ever noticed that?  When you don’t have kids, you can’t escape parents who constantly tell you about all the wonderful things you’re missing.  Picture after picture posted on Facebook, all those Christmas cards of the happy family, the occasional awkward question about whether you’re ever going to have kids.

But once you announce you’re having a kid, the tune changes.  Now, all they want to do is gloat about how miserable you’re going to be.  They laugh and laugh like hyenas — “oh, all that nice furniture you bought for you new condo, THAT’S all over,” “enjoy your nights out while you still can,” stuff like that.  Like the vampire at your window trying to seduce you into going outside, or the the old joke about the devil:

John arrives at the Pearly Gates. St. Peter tells John that he has arrived at a moment where the balance between Heaven and Hell is exactly equal. This event allows him the unique opportunity to take a look around at Heaven AND Hell and decide where he wants to spend eternity.

John takes a little stroll around Heaven … nice puffy clouds…people hanging around playing harps…smiling…peaceful. He thinks that looks pretty nice. Could be a good choice. With that he hops in the elevator down to Hell…

The doors open and the devil shows him into a big room….WOW…. What a party! People dancing, drinking up a storm, singing, laughing, having an amazing time. “Now,” he shouts, “THIS is the way to spend eternity!”

He jumps back on the elevator and runs to tell St. Peter that while Heaven is certainly lovely, Hell is simply an awesome party and that is his choice. John jumps back on the elevator and when the doors open he is shocked to see flames shooting everywhere, people screaming with fear and pain, etc….

John quickly runs to find the Devil and says, “What happened? I was just here and it was a giant party.. how could this be?”

“Simple,” replies The Devil .“Before you were a prospect… now you’re a client!”

Essentially, that’s what happens.  When you don’t have kids, you’re a prospect — all these parents want you to join the team, so they try to make it as appealing as possible. Then once you sign up, they can let it all hang out.  Jackals. Oh, how I hate them.

Filed Under: Best of, Humor, My Life in the Suburbs, Parenting in the Suburbs Tagged With: ,

One of the Two Best Days of My Life: The Day I Bought My Boat

May 15, 2011 by

It’s an old joke.  The two best days of your life are when you buy a boat, and when you finally sell that boat.

So I got myself a boat.  I took the plunge, which is not necessarily the best turn of phrase I could have chosen.  I live in a condo right on the Hudson River, and can see the river from pretty much every room in the house. It seemed crazy to live right there on the water without being able to take advantage of it. So for the last year or so, I’ve been determined to get myself a boat.

Imagine it.  A boat docked right outside my condo, literally a two-minute walk from my front door.  Beautiful Saturday afternoon, we pack a lunch, invite some friends, take a spin around the Hudson, maybe even take it into Manhattan for dinner and avoid the traffic.  So cool!

Now, I should point out one minor flaw in my plan. Namely, that I know nothing about boats.  Literally, nothing.  I don’t even know how they don’t sink, big heavy things sitting out on the water. Something about buoyancy, I’ve heard, but to me it’s magic.  I don’t know how planes fly, either.  Honestly, I don’t know anything.

You know how in the movies people travel back in time and they’re able to take advantage of their superior technological knowledge to get rich or whatever — like, they can make gunpowder or cure illnesses and stuff like that?  Well, if you sent me back 200 years into the past, I’d be totally useless. I’d be all like, “hey, there’s this thing called ‘electricity’ and we can use it to power our houses,” and then people would ask me to explain how it works and I’d basically tell them that you plug cords into outlets in a wall and there you have it!  Electricity!  SPOOKY MAGIC MAN FROM THE FUTURE!

You’d pretty much have to send me like a thousand years in the past for me to have any sort of technological advantage over the people from that time.  Maybe all the way back to the cavemen.  I’m pretty sure I could kick some real ass in a caveman society — the wheel, fire, washing your hands.  I’d be the king of the cavemen.  Otherwise, totally useless.

Anyway, back to boats. I know nothing about them.  I’ve ridden in them, and probably driven piloted a few over the years, but most of my boating memories involve all the times I’ve broken propellers.  I break a propellor virtually every time I take a boat out, on rocks, sandbars, human flesh — basically whatever gets in my way.  It’s actually deeply hard-wired into my genes: my dad used to take us out on boats down in Florida, and pretty much every trip involved us all getting out and trying to push ourselves off a sand bar.

All that said, I’m getting a boat. I figure that things will be different now that I’m all grown up and all.  I have enough free cash to cover the cost and the myriad expenses that I expect will pop up. And I’ve heard that boating on the Hudson is pretty easy — deep water, no sand bars, clearly marked waterways, etc.

But the real reason is that I just want one.  I’m a grown man, I make a good living, and if I want to throw away some of my money, well, then, I’m just going to do it.

See you out on the water!

 

 

Filed Under: Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , , ,
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