I don't have many friends, and never really did.
Even when I was at my most popular, I drew my spiritual covers close under my chin and didn't share my blanket with many. My coterie of friends is usually one or two close ones--maybe three--and a small periphery beyond that inner orbit.
It takes years for me to put out the welcome mat.
It takes milliseconds for me to whisk it away.
Since I stopped working in a proper office and started spending about 95.67-percent of my time in my basement office well beneath the surface of the earth, my network has contracted. Not only did my best friend of fifty years die (such friendships don't come with understudies) so too did my work father/mentor die just last summer. Adding to that, I work more and more independently now--mostly sans art director and sans "support" people like I had when I worked for others. I employ one person--who's a friend, but we're three-thousand miles apart, and both wired for efficiency, not a chatty-kathy geniality.
In short, it's not unusual for me to go an entire week and have maybe two human conversations. Those are usually with clients, so I suppose--to be mean about it--I could put the word human in italics, as if it were written by Salinger, replete with sarcasm.
All that being said, I am seldom lonely. My interests remain varied and keep me occupied, and my connection with Sparkle, my nearly-perfect two-and-a-half year-old golden retriever keeps flourishing. While she is different from Whiskey--slightly less present, she is a wise companion as we take long seaside walks looking for trouble along this coastline or that. On top of Sparkle, I have developed an interstitial way of reading and writing where one things leads to another. I keep finding new things to learn about and keep developing and deepening my world view. There are a lot of people with scores of friends who have no world view. I'd rather be alone with one then surrounded and devoid.
Just about 90 minutes ago, I arrived in New York's newly developed Moynihan train-station by Amtrak, the chronically under-funded amerikan't train system. The new train-station is built inside an old post office and is really just a mall with diesel exhaust and intermittent whiffs of urine-soaked-homelessness. amerry-cannot has a decimal place problem. Everything that kills or enriches the plutocrat class has plenty of numbers to the left of the decimal. Everything that helps the lümpen has few numbers to the left.
It looks like this: Murderrapemayhemreverserobinhoodtheivery.00
Good.00
The northeast corridor includes 17 percent of the country’s inhabitants--about 58 million people--and 20 percent of its trade on just 1.4 percent of its land. The I-95 Corridor Coalition calculates that 60 percent of the thruway’s urban sections are already congested and predicts that car traffic will increase by 85 percent by 2035. And nearly half of the nation’s domestic flight delays originate in New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. In 2019 (pre-covid) six hundred fifty thousand passengers ratted through Penn Station each day, more people than flew out of Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark airports combined.
New York, especially after a few months of stultifying connecticutness, can be a dispiriting place. Everyone is head down rushing like mad, no one is watching where they're going and fully-a-third of all those people look like they haven't showered since amerikkka's previous illegal war, about four weeks ago.
But New York is New York. There is a quality here that makes sense, a conviviality, a warmth and a humanity that in the rest of ameridon't seems to have been cost-consultanted out of consideration. We live in a nothing for nothing nation. And now that everything you buy, everyplace you go to for help, everything you eat is owned by one or another giant private-equity held money squeeze, decent treatment, politeness and smiles are off the MBA-world's agenda.
But as I said, New York is New York.
I got on the "whites only Q train" outside of Macy's. (I say "whites only" because the train goes no further north than 96th Street. Not daring to enter black and brown Manhattan.) In moments I was disgorged at 72nd and Second amid the Vik Muniz subway art and the effervescent and always under-construction Upper East Side gentility I love so much.
I headed like a migrating animal to Sable's, an Asian-run Jewish appetizing storefront that's been a fixture in the neighborhood for over 40 years, since Kenny broke off from Zabar's on the Upper West Side and opened up his own small smoked-salmon Shangri-la.
I'd been having a craving for a lox on a salt bagel sandwich of old-school dimensions for about a month. I had thought about stopping by Barney Greengrass on West 86th Street, the last place I had had such a treat (about four years ago) but they were closed for Passover, so Sable's it was.
No sooner did I enter the small shop when a burly Asian man behind the counter handed me a small-niblick of bagel with about four-ounces of hand-cut smoked salmon on it. I hadn't even ordered anything yet. But Sable's calculus has always been, "treat customers well and they'll keep coming back."
I did the math in my head. They returned a $6 sample of lox on my $100 expenditure. Not a bad ROI for anyone but an MBA.
Today, in New York or not, treating people with pre-emptive dignity and kindness is a vestige of a naive era. Why bother? Everything is owned by a monopoly and there's no place else people can go, so fuk'em.
If you don't like Verizon, try AT&T, they're worse. If you don't like Delta, try United, they're worse. If you don't like the dimmycrats, try the repugnicants, they're worse. If you don't like omnicant, try pubickiss, they're worse.
You see this from almost everyone you do business with. Then after paying mandatory service charges for peremptory service, and $6 for four slices of bread, you get this, in lieu of genuine caring.
The world was better off when you got samples of lox and weren't merely a survey sample.
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