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Today's soundtrack: here she comes, full blast and top down

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Today at 8:02pm: getting my "sea legs"

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#

I keep forgetting New York is a bunch of islands, islands surrounded by water, water filled with fishes. Or fish.

Nine of us went up to City Island in the Bronx to go deep-sea fishing. It was John's idea, I know nothing about fish, and the most experience I have with fishing is in college I dated a girl who wore fishnet stockings for a few lucky days each semester.

The Bronx is where hip-hop was invented, but City Island, in the same borough, looks almost alarmingly like New England. It's covered in shockingly lush vegetation, green as far as the eye can see, with birds that don't look like pigeons. Hard to believe it's still technically New York City.

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#

The S.S. Afrika Bambataa
(Okay, not really)

At the end of the dock was this boat a little smaller than the one in Gilligan's Island. We climbed on board and met the skipper, whose name I never caught, and a guy named Carl, the fishmaster or whatever you call him. Carl was your genuine wizened old fisherman, with grey whiskers and everything.

The skipper was pure outerborough New York, he kind of looked like a burly Billy Joel with tattoos and had the New York Public Schools accent. Carl, the older of the two, looked like Gandalf with shorter hair; his face was weatherbeaten and wrinkled, and although I'm sure he was in his forties, a life under unforgiving sun made him look like an octogenarian. He was wearing a sour expression and suspended blue rubber pants that came up to his chest.

The skipper fired up the engine, which sounded not unlike a Pontiac GTO. He tuned the radio to a classic rock station as we roared slowly away from the dock and into the Long Island Sound.

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#

Not sure what these are, but they ain't pigoens.

It was about 7pm when we set out. Carl didn't seem particularly interested in talking to any of us, but I asked him some questions anyway.

While talking to him I discovered Carl had a powerful stink on him, like an I-haven't-been-laid-in-25-years kind of stink. (John later insisted my analysis was off by at least nine years, since Carl had a kid who was sixteen, but I'm guessing the kid was adopted.) But I liked Carl right away, and here's why: Some people, when you try to talk to them over the din of something loud, like a boat engine, they'll lean closer to you to hear what you have to say. But Carl didn't lean forward at all, he just cast a wary eye on me and seemed to evaluate what I was saying, to decide whether or not he'd bother responding. This is a guy who will never bullshit you, I thought. I prefer rude honesty to fake politeness.

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#

Christy's from Canada and has some experience with fishing.

"What type of fishes are we trying to catch?" I asked her.

"Bass and bluefish," she said. "Do you know what a bluefish is?"

"Of course," I said. "It's the one from the Dr. Seuss book."

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#

From the piscean horror movie Silence of the Fishes

On one side of the boat was the world's most disgusting sushi table, a grimy and blood-soaked cutting board with all kinds of creepy knives and fish guts on it. Carl took some fish out of a bucket and started hacking them into cross-sections, which he then attached to hooks about the size of a human thumb.

Ringing the perimeter of the boat were about a dozen fishing rods, mounted in holsters made from PVC piping. Carl went around and attached the bait-laden hooks to all of them. His hands were bloody but he didn't seem to mind.

After we'd been driving--is it sailing? No, driving--for about a half-hour, the skipper stopped the boat and put the parking brake on. "Reel 'em out," he called back from the driver's seat.

Carl took one of the rods, "reeled it out" and handed it to me. I wasn't really sure what to do so I stood there with it and fiddled with the controls a little. There's a little rotating crank and some kind of latch that has two positions, like on and off. I guess you turn it on when you want fish.

Eventually everyone had a fishing rod in hand. Some members of the group had clearly done this before and held the rods with an easy, familiar grip. Others looked slightly uncomfortable, like they had just woken up with five-foot penises and were gingerly holding them for the first time.

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#

Christy was the first to land a fish, and she reeled it in excitedly while everyone shouted. Carl announced it was a bluefish, and as it came out of the water I was disappointed--it looked nothing like the one from the book! Dr. Seuss may have delighted millions of children with his clever little rhyming books, but I can now tell you he is a hack and a scam artist who has clearly never seen a real bluefish in his life.

Look at the drawing, he wasn't even close!
I've never seen a grinch in person either but now
I'm thinking it looks nothing like the cartoon.

The fish was flopping around like crazy on the line. "Don't put your hands near its mouth," shouted the skipper, grabbing it while we all stared. "It's got teeth like razor blades, it'll take your fingers right off."

You wanna stick your fingers in that thing, be my guest.

After landing her fish Christy dropped her rod on the deck, and an infuriated Carl gave her an earful, like totally chewed her out. We were in Carl's world. When you're an expert on some type of craft that all the other passengers are unfamiliar with, you can get away with being bluntly unkind. If I was trapped on the Space Shuttle and one of the astronauts was yelling "I SAID PASS THE TANG, ASSHOLE" at me I'd probably put up with it.

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#

More than once I was sure Carl was going
to hurl me over the side of the boat.

Next I got a bite, and my fishing line started unspooling like crazy. Carl shook his head, snatched the rod out of my hands and did something with the controls.

"It got away," he said in disgust, handing the rod back to me. He flipped the latch to one position, demonstrating how to keep the line locked in place, which is apparently how you're supposed to hold it, and looked at me like I just ate someone's asshole out.

I reeled my line back up to inspect it. The fish I didn't catch had taken a big-ass chunk out of the bait, mangling it, without touching the hook. The son of a bitch got a free meal!

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#

If anyone has ever called you a chum-
bucket, this is what they're referring to.
I'm sorry, my friend.

The sun started going down, and the skipper fired up the engines again. "Reel 'em in," he called back, and the nine of us obeyed. As Led Zeppelin came wafting out of the speakers, he steered the boat further out, towards deeper waters. I checked my back pocket to make sure my knife was still there. I brought it in case of, you know, pirates. Laugh if you want but if we got boarded I wouldn't be fighting them off with a rusty fishhook, no, no.

The sky was dark. I could see the faint, orange-ish glow of Manhattan's light pollution in the direction we had come from, but the direction we were headed in was pitch dark.

Led Zeppelin changed to Van Halen, and the skipper turned the floodlights on, illuminating the boat deck. The boat suddenly felt very small and the dark water seemed very big. It was pretty cool. We were like this small, brightly-lit beacon of classic rock driving out into the inky blackness.

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#

About an hour out the skipper parked again, and we all "reeled 'em out." I tried copying what I saw Carl do earlier, which was to flick the hook really far, but I couldn't get it to go further than three feet before it hit the water.

Carl demonstrated with the pole next to me. He manipulated the rod deftly and flicked his wrist, sending the bait soaring a good twenty five feet away from the boat. "Ay Carl," I said. "You've done this before, huh."

"My second day," he grinned, and it was the only time I saw him smile the whole trip.

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#

Me and Francis were at the back of the boat, and something small, bright and far away caught my vision.

"Fireworks," someone said. A pyrotechnic show was taking place somewhere over Manhattan. Bright starbursts of red, white and blue, tiny and distant, exploded silently over the horizon.

"Isn't it a little early for July 4th?" said Jiae.

"It's probably the warm-up show," I said. I pictured a bunch of Macy's interns blowing their fingers off while the fireworks director ironed out the kinks.

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#

"Fish on," I heard someone yell, then turned to see Frankie frantically reeling one in and leaning backwards while her pole bent forwards. I put my rod in the holster and rushed to the side of the boat to see this enormous silver thing zig-zagging through the water. After struggling for a bit she hauled this enormous bluefish, must've been thirty inches long, up onto the deck, where Carl grabbed it. His back was to me and I couldn't see how he removed it from the hook. The freed fish wriggled around on the deck like a jumping bean, then Carl stomped his foot down on its head, producing blood.

But the fish didn't die. Carl picked it up and threw it into the fish bin, where it continued wriggling on a bed of his dead buddies. Kinda creepy.

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#

I was at the back of the boat, but Christy and Frankie had both caught their fishes on the right side, so I abandoned Francis and moved over there. The skipper was talking with Frankie (a girl, not to be confused with Francis, a guy).

"During the daytime I work on a ferry," said the skipper. "I used to be with the Staten Island Ferry, then I started with this smaller ferry up here. It's two minutes from my house so it's a lot better for me. Only difference is the passengers on the first ferry are alive, on this one they're all dead."

I looked at him blankly.

"Potter's Field," he explained, referencing the cemetery on Hart Island where New York City (using friendly prison labor borrowed from Riker's, another untouristed city island) buries its anonymous dead--homeless people and the bodies at the morgue no one shows up to claim. I always wondered how they got the bodies out there, and now I'd met the man who ferried them. I'm hanging out with friggin' Charon over here.

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#

Then I caught a fish! I don't remember feeling a tug; it seemed I went from doing nothing to having an animated tug of war with a suddenly epileptic fishing rod. I stood dumbly in place, jerking the stick around like I was being electrocuted, until the skipper's hoarse shouting reminded me that I had to reel the damn thing in. It wasn't easy--for such a small, flat animal, a fish generates an absurd amount of opposing thrust--but eventually I sealed the fish's fate with small, steady rotations of my hand.

Once it came up out of the water, Carl bumped me out of the way and snatched the wriggling bluefish in his hands. It was maybe a foot long. Carl used some kind of metal stick to separate the fish from the hook with a twirling motion, and whacked it on the deck. Then he picked it up and threw it hard on the deck, WHAP, the way you throw a phone book at a cockroach.

The fish didn't die. Carl stomped on its head, which made the fish bloody but it still kept flopping around. He picked it up and threw it in the bin, where it continued twitching. I thought I saw Christy's fish, which had stopped twitching, start moving again, and that was creepy.

It was kind of exciting when I caught it, but the feeling passed almost instantly. Catching fish is not like a real kill, where you're lining a deer up in rifle crosshairs or stomping on the gas while aiming the hood of your Chevy at a deadbeat bookie who had it coming to him. You just kind of stand there waiting, maybe you kill something and maybe you don't.

I watched the fish twitching around in the bin with mixed feelings. It's always weird to do something like camping or fishing--activities that were once necessary for survival but that have now been reduced, in this era of boutique hotels and supermarkets, to a quaint form of recreation.

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#

The group observed that all the fish were being caught on one side of the boat. Kirk, Tony, Neil and Francis, all luckless, were on the other side.

"You guys want to come over to the good side?" Jiae offered.

"Nah, we can do it over here," said Kirk, sticking to his guns. He was drunk and a little merry. "Come on, starboard side!" he cheered.

I looked to see he was sitting on the left side of the boat. "For fuck's sake, that's port," I pointed out.

"Come on, port side!" said Kirk.

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#

Pete and John also caught some fishes. We stayed out for about five hours total, and I was proud I didn't have to use the bathroom once. It was below decks and the second Tony went down there he got seasick.

Around midnight the skipper turned the boat around and hit the gas. "Reel 'em up," he called, for the last time.

All in all it was pretty fun, especially with the classic rock station playing in the background. You haven't lived until you've been serenaded by Axl Rose on the Long Island Sound while fireworks go off over Manhattan.

I think we passed Hart's Island on the way back, but I couldn't be sure in the darkness. Kind of an interesting day job the skipper had. All of us would go back to Manhattan, and tomorrow the captain would go back to his Potter's Field ferry. The group of us paid sixty bucks each for the privilege of his passage; but if you die friendless and alone in New York, the city's final gift to you is a free boat ride. I think ours was a better deal.

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fly

drink

aim

shoot

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I’m posting this up here for a friend of mine.

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These are the specifically Asian roles we're looking for (the cast will probably be somewhat multi-ethnic). Please forward to anyone at all, friends, family, family of friends, friends of friends, etc. who might want to try acting or know people who might.


UNTITLED Koreatown Comedy Project

JOE
Age 30-45 Korean/Korean-American/Asian/Asian-American Male
Can speak with a slight local New York accent. Tough, jaded, tattoos a plus.

OPA
Age 25-35 Korean/Korean-American/Asian/Asian-American Male
Strong, masculine, threatening.

LITTLE FRANK
Age12-15 Korean American/Asian American Male
Can speak with a local NY accent. Intensely smart, precocious.

LITTLE JEAN
Age 12-15 Korean American/Asian American Male
Can speak with a local NY accent. Innocent, very emotional.

LYDIA
Age 20-35 Korean-American/Asian-American Female
Intensely shy, artistic, practically mute. Dancer a plus.

ANNIE
Age 20-35 Korean-American/Asian-American Female
Beautiful. Knows how to strut her stuff. But also intelligent and a little crazy. Well-spoken, very American.

JIN
Age 20-35 Korean/Korean-American/Asian/Asian American Female
No-nonsense, hard-working. Dominating, bold. Preferably a 1 1/2 generationer (moved to America in her teens) or a more newly-arrived immigrant.

SOOK
Age 20-35 Korean/Korean American/Asian/Asian American Female
Sassy, cute, could be a gangster girl. Preferably a 1 1/2 generationer or a more newly-arrived immigrant.

Shoot is in July. For the above roles, a max of 4 shoot days with some rehearsal. WE LOVE NON-ACTORS. Don't you know someone who is perfect for these roles???

If interested, please send e-mail to wseoling@gmail.com with the following information: Put CASTING: and the name of the role or roles you want to try, in the RE: line. Please give us your name, phone number, e-mail, and if possible, a photograph or headshot.

LOVE AND THANK YOU!

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Today’s soundtrack: out of sight in the night out of sight in the day

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Today at 3:02pm: Dae Han Min Guk

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#

It’s easier to fall in love with a bar than with a woman, and last night around 10pm I fell in love the easy way. The place was called 169 Bar, the only watering hole on a dingy, out-of-the-way stretch of East Broadway.

Earlier, at 8:30pm I was in a different bar, eating a hamburger for dinner. Lately I’ve taken to eating dinner by myself in dark bars, if you haven’t reached this point yet you should try it, it is a fantastic way to convince yourself you will die alone. Anyways the Brazil/Australia game was being replayed and I watched with rapt attention while burger juice ran down my fingers and another milliliter* of my soul dried up and vanished.

To my left, two tough-guys were drinking and yapping loudly, ignoring the game and using “fuck” every other word. Hearing it made me realize how uneducated and low-class it sounds, and I hereby vow to use the word “fuck” less. (And if I can’t do that I’ll use the word “fuckless.”)

Anyways I’m about to kill the burger when my phone goes off. I pick up, getting burger grease all over it without caring, and it’s Musician Girl. She says she’s playing a gig--make that “gig” in quotes, you’ll see why in a minute--at some place I’ve never heard of, called 169 Bar.

“The bar is empty except for like, one or two moaning drunks,” Musician Girl explains. “Do you want to come?” I remember well the sensation of getting up on stage and addressing a small and uninterested audience, and it’s not a pretty one, being on the opposite side from “orgasm” on the pinwheel of human experiences. I figure she could use the support.

“I’m there,” I say, and 90 minutes later, I am.

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169 Bar is a ground-floor affair, but it feels like a basement. Low ceilings, horrible lighting, half-assed plaster job on the columns, the type of place where you can get a drink and not run into anyone you know. I liked it right away. The whole place is made out of leftovers. In one corner, a chewed-up red vinyl banquette that probably looked great in the 1950s; along the wall, two heavy wooden benches of the sort you’d find in an old train station; in another corner, a rocking chair. The lighting is comprised of everything from candle lanterns to naked red bulbs to ‘80s retro-deco track lighting.

Perched on a singular stool by the front window is a milk-fed blond chick with a guitar, belting country music woes into a mic. She’s got talent and the white variety of soul and you can hear the feeling in her voice. Two guys in low-rent suits watch her.

There’s a TV over the bar and a pool table in the back. At the end of the bar itself are two honest-to-god outerborough barflies with an awesomely sleazy neo-skank thing going on. The two barflies and the two suits don’t seem aware of each other, it’s like everyone is in their own little dive-bar world.

Yet I wouldn’t call the place a proper dive. I don’t know how to describe it but there’s something there, something in the air, something to fill a void.

Even though the bar is clearly a broken-dream kind of place in a never-was neighborhood, it’s still New York, so I expect to pay ten bucks for a glass of scotch. But the Black only runs me eight, so I pass the savings on to the bartender. Math is apparently not his strong suit. After paying for the drink I hand him a five and ask for singles. “How many singles?” he asks blankly, and I’m tempted to ask for six.

The blond chick bangs out a couple numbers, then takes a powder. Next an unseen DJ starts spinning the best goddamn soul music I’ve ever heard.

One of the suits approaches the blond chick as she packs up her guitar and starts hitting on her. Despite the three-button uniform he’s got a lascivious air about him, like one of those guys who works in Sales and is outwardly respectable, but you just know at home he’s got only the most disturbing types of pornography. As Musician Girl (the one I came with, not the blond) walks past, he swivels his head mid-conversation to stare unabashedly at her ass. Real class act.

In addition to the few patrons there’s a white guy and a black guy walking around like they own the place, and one of them does. It’s the older white guy, who tells me his name is Charles, and who I’m surprised to see is also the guy spinning tracks. I compliment him on his taste in music and ask him if everything he’s got in his collection is this good. He says it is.

The black guy runs the live music show and tells Musician Girl she’ll be up in ten minutes. As the two of them shoot the shit, I sink into a banquette and swallow the potion while music spills out of the speakers. The owner doesn’t let up on the tracks, it’s just back-to-back joints, and a lot of rare shit I’ve never heard before. That pretty much seals it. I don’t know how much the bar owner is paying in annual rent, but I’m about to start helping him pay it, one whiskey-soaked installment at a time. And I need to sneak a recorder into this place.

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#

*I assume souls are measured in liquid units, and metric seems better than Imperial.

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Today’s soundtrack: not to be cool I rock and rule

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Today at 12:02pm: paying the Con Ed bill (late)

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#

Today I slapped a woman for the first time. Repeatedly. I have been slapped by a woman before (long story), though I have never been slapped by a man or by Rick James like Charlie Murphy was, but today was the first time my palms met a woman’s (facial) cheeks at velocity.

It was part of the martial arts class, of course. For those of you who just tuned in I’m studying something called Xing Yi, which I’ll have to get around to explaining at some point, or you could Wikipedia it if you have a lot of time on your hands. Anyways forget your hands, let’s get back to my hands and the slapping.

Martial arts is of course about training your body to do certain things, things most people cannot or do not do, in order to be able to defend yourself. And a large part of that training is weeding certain reflexes out of your body. For example most people will flinch, blink, shrink or cower when a punch is thrown at them, because for most people who didn’t grow up in prison this is the natural response.

Needless to say these responses will earn you an ass-whipping in a fight, so for a segment of each 2.5 hour class our instructor has us do various drills to get rid of these reflexes. Today we had to square off with our partner and slap each other. Not whole-hog, but enough to make it sting. The idea is to take the slaps without blinking, which is pretty fucking hard. Anyways I got paired up with the one female in the class, we are often paired up because we are similar in size and that makes initial training easier, and my heart kind of sank when I saw the instructor demonstrate the drill and realized I was going to have to slap her.

I got slapped first, but like I said it wasn’t exactly a new experience for me. The not blinking part was, though. It’s a real bitch! Slap your own cheek now and try it.

Haha, did you do it? If you did it’s awesome because it means you’re sitting in a room somewhere in Kentucky or Japan reading my blog and slapping yourself. Anyways if you did do it and had no problem not blinking, I assure you it’s different when someone else is throwing the shots.

Then it was my turn to do it to the girl. My first few slaps were pretty unenthusiastic and I apologized after every other one, thus behaving like what the British call a “ninny.”

“You’re not doing anything,” the instructor chided me, taking my place and laying some proper slaps across the girl’s face. She’s pretty tough (five years of experience training in Changquan/Long Fist, I believe) and had no problem taking them. So I started slapping her harder, though I have to admit I had to start soft and then ramp up.

It was a weird experience and afterwards our cheeks were all red. “Is that the first time you’ve ever slapped a woman?” my partner joked, rubbing her cheeks.

“Yeah,” I confessed, “though I never thought it would be like this.” I thought it would be more like, I’d be dating some Italian contessa and after I caught her cheating on me with the Duke of Earl I’d destroy her Maserati with a tire iron, then she’d confront me all passionately and strike me, and I’d retaliate by laying five fingers of pimp right across her grill, then we would grab each other and tumble to the ground and have passionate sex in front of the wreckage of the mangled Maserati with some bel canto coming out of a stereo somewhere.

But no, instead I slapped my martial arts partner on a dusty basketball court in the basement of a church off Seventh Avenue, and I haven’t seen a Maserati since the last episode of Entourage. But I think I’ve got some bel canto somewhere on this hard drive, now if you’ll excuse me.

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Today’s soundtrack: we can be happy underground

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Today at 12:02pm: suffering fools on the corner

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#

Tourists are idiots. I used to think they were regular people like you and me, but now I know the truth. You can’t stand still for more than five minutes on any corner downtown before some tourist comes up and says “Can you tell me where the subway is?” after which the conversation always goes the same way.

“Which one?” you ask.

“Uh...any subway,” they say.

For chrissakes. This is like going into an airport and saying “Can you tell me where the gate is?”

“Which gate?”

“Oh, any gate.”

Tourists seem to think the subway is some magical place where trains at any station will take you wherever you want to go. They think the MTA is run by fucking Harry Potter. They seem to have no concept that there are 25 train lines that go different places, and I love when you’re on the east side and they ask you where the 1/9 is.

“It’s ten blocks west,” I say. Then they always make that face and go “Ten blocks?” as if I’m going to think about it and say “Oh, wait, I meant only ten feet. But don’t worry, there’s a Starbucks only five feet away where you can rest and have a mochaccino.” Get a goddamned guidebook, hah?

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Today’s soundtrack: you don’t wear continental clothes or a stetson hat

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Today at 12:02pm: commuting to lunch

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#

I saw the hottest book the other day. I love St. Mark’s Books because they have all the interesting, subversive shit you don’t see at Barnes & Noble.

So you know how stores have coffee table books called Tuscan Style: A Step Back in Time or Japanese Style: Minimal is Beautiful and they’re filled with images of how people live in those areas? With pictures of like, rustic kitchens in Florence or zen-style dining rooms in Hokkaido?

Well at S.M.B. I saw this book called Dictator Style: Lifestyles of the World’s Most Colorful Despots. It was fucking awesome, filled with pictures of like, Joseph Stalin’s couch, Saddam Hussein’s bathroom, Hitler’s tea seat, Mussolini’s writing table, Idi Amin’s parlor (who knew cannibals had parlors) and fucking Manuel Noriega’s Christmas tree. Just awesome. I don’t know that I’d actually pay money for the book, but it looks like a good gift, or something you’d bring to a dinner party and laugh about for at least fifteen minutes. And you know you want to see Slobodan Milosevic’s fucking bedroom.

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Today’s soundtrack:
everything is adding
up, up, up

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Today at 12:02pm: eating cheap

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#

Me and a guy buddy of mine who lives around the way were walking to Italian Food Center on Grand to get sandwiches. Said guy buddy is fond of making random proclamations.

“I bet I could kill people,” he said.

“What?” I said.

“You know how like, when you go to war,” he said, “you have to disconnect something in your psyche so that you can kill other human beings? Like you have to turn your humanity off?”

“Uh, right,” I said.

“I’m pretty sure I could do that no problem,” he said. “I think for most people it’s a stretch, but I bet I could shut if off like that.” He snapped his fingers in a downward motion.

“Like that?” I said, snapping my fingers in an upward motion.

“Like that,” he said, snapping again, downward.

“Good for you,” I said, and we went in to buy our sandwiches.

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Today’s soundtrack: you’re my pop rocks

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Today at 10:02am: waking up too early for a Sunday

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#

If anybody lives/works in the financial district and wants to join a gym, I can get you a membership at Gold's Gym (at Gold and John Streets) for $49.99/month. I signed up at this gym because I think it’s worth it for the unlimited classes alone (yoga/spinning/kickboxing etc.).

Limited time only, they sent me this flyer in the mail. Drop a line if you want it and I’ll hook you up.

- Rain

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Today’s soundtrack: you can wait a thousand years in line for that stillness in time

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Today at 6:02pm: spilling (secrets)

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Nature has a good long-distance plan, in that Nature calls all the time, even when you’re in the city. That coffee you just drank, the half-priced breakfast burrito, the hot dog on the way to the subway, all of the things we take into our body have to come back out again--sometimes before we make it back to our bathrooms at home or at the office.

You could just suck it up and pay for a coffee at a cafe in order to use their bathroom, but add this up at once a week for five bucks a coffee, and you’re looking at additional annual expenses north of $250. Spread over ten years that’s $2,500 you’ve literally flushed down the toilet, the price of a decent used Toyota, all because you couldn’t hold it.

#

If you live in Manhattan long enough, you start building up an incidental database of locations with bathrooms where you don’t have to buy anything. Among my friends and I, these NYC Bathroom Databases have always been jealously guarded secrets.

Why the secrecy? Because if one person has a good experience, they’ll tell ten friends, and before you know it your go-to shitter has been overrun by passersby, some of whom will pee all over the seat. It sounds crazy, but it happens. I had the perfect secret bathroom spot on the corner of Lafayette and Houston, in the Puck Building, that was sealed off from public access due to increased traffic. If I and some other people had kept our mouths shut, that bathroom might be alive today.

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The act of finding free bathrooms is an art. For guys it is simpler, but to piss on the sidewalk behind a UPS truck is artless and savage. No, the thoughtful city dweller will seek out and discover well-stocked lavatories off the beaten path, for example, a hotel you can sneak into without alerting staff of your true mission and non-guest status.

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As an experiment, I will break my vow of bathroom omerta and list one of my (admittedly less secret) spots here, in the hopes of starting a list that fellow NYC readers will contribute to. If you have the good graces to post, please list your gender, as male and female bathrooms at the same location often offer vastly different experiences.

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Bathrooms should be judged by the following criteria:

Fit & finish. Do the toilets have seats? Do the stalls have doors that close and lock securely? Do the stall doors, when closed, prevent the possibility of making eye contact through the gap?

Cool-down time. Cool-down time refers to the amount of time a toilet has gone unused. For example the bathroom of a Starbucks, with its long queues, has a cool-down time of zero, meaning someone has used the toilet right before you. Obviously this is undesirable because there are still certain...traces left behind by the previous occupant, not to mention the seat is often warm, announcing its status as a prime conveyor of Ass Cooties.

In contrast, infrequently used bathrooms have a high cool-down time, meaning no one has used it for at least twenty minutes, ensuring fresh air has circulated and you are getting a “fresh” toilet, so to speak.

Availability of toilet paper. Because the cleanest, freshest bathroom in the world is no good if you have to wipe your ass with the Styles section of the New York Times. The only colon that should have ink in it is this one :

Availability of ablutionary materials. The reason all those people died during the Dark Ages was so that we could live in a world filled with ample soap and paper towels, and could wash our hands each and every time we use a toilet. Excretion without ablution is an abomination.

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My own contribution:

NYC Bathroom #Downtown-7B

Access: Convenient for Broadway, sub-Houston
Venue: Bloomingdales Department Store
Location: Broadway between Spring & Broome, east side of the street
Method of Entry: Entry points on both Broadway and Crosby. Proceed downstairs. Bathroom corridor is in center of north wall, near fitting rooms.

Review: The basement location of this sparklingly clean lavatory virtually eliminates sidewalk traffic and walk-ins. The semi-hidden geography, combined with two stalls, ensures high cool-down times. Fit & finish of stalls is premium quality. Toilet paper is ample and often re-stocked, though it is unfortunately of the unperforated, occasionally difficult-to-unroll “car tire” variety, as opposed to individual rolls. Well-stocked with hand soap, paper towels and electric hand dryers.

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Enjoy.

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Today’s soundtrack: one of many zeros

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Today at 12:02pm: standing still in a sea of moving pedestrians

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Last week I happened to look skyward and briefly saw, between slivers of skyscrapers, an airliner being escorted by two fighter jets. At the same time a lights-and-sirens fire engine roared past. The latter event is common in Manhattan but not the former.

I scanned the other people on the street for signs of panic but no one else seemed to be doing the math. The math containing the numbers 9 and 11. Was I the only one who saw the plane with the fighter jets? It’s a well-known fact that New Yorkers almost never look skyward; I behave like a tourist in my own town because I am always looking for down-to-up photo ops.

Worried, I text-messaged a friend who works in an office and had him check the news sites to see if there was “anything going on.”

“Nothing on CNN NYtimes or NY1,” he texted back. I relaxed, put the panic in the back of my mind with the bills and my future career worries, and looked around for some photos to take.

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Later I was in the basement of a church on the west side. I dislike the west side of Manhattan but sometimes you have to go. I’m studying an internal martial art called Xing Yi and the classes are held in a dusty, subterranean basketball court at the bottom of one of God’s houses. It’s real fight-club style, about a dozen grunting dudes in track pants and sweat-stained shirts, though recently a girl has joined the class.

Anyways I ask if anyone else saw the plane with the escorts today.

“Well, it’s Fleet Week,” says one of the fellas. I feel simultaneously dumb and relieved. The plane I saw being escorted was probably not a commercial airliner, just some military craft. Fleet Week is when a shitload of Navy ships pulls into port and Manhattan is covered in gangs of sailors wearing white uniforms, which I had somehow failed to notice while scanning the streets of Manhattan for photo ops.

In the center of the basketball court, I went through my pushups and wondered at the inconsistency of my observations.

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