“Sometimes” (grr..) New York is weird.

Seriously, I’m retyping these stories because they made me laugh, and think, and laugh. Alas, here’s to trying to remember….

Yesterday I went to the Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle, near the southeast corner of Central Park. It’s actually a gorgeous building which houses a Borders Bookstore (where I finally picked up a copy of the Not For Tourists Guide to New York) and a Whole [Paycheck] Foods, which encompasses the entirety of the building’s basement floor. I was in awe, and then I saw the checkout line. Or rather I saw a bored man standing with a sign on a long pole, which indicated where the line began. As we turned the corner, the line diverged into three single-file queues, each of which wrapped back and forth like airport terminal security check points before emerging in a forest of illuminated cash registers complete with entwined metal foliage. The driving force behind these 40+ registers, stood at the edge of each line: A large television screen, mounted from the ceiling, and an automated voice. Their combined aural/visual assault of “39″ “12″ “24″ would send their smiling customers to the first available cashier, where they could buy their overpriced organic groceries and happily emerge into the city in a manner that I felt somewhat akin to any number of terrifying science fiction books in which we lose our humanity to machines.

That being said, those groceries made a damn good curry. Thanks Nancy.

So, then we were on our way back, riding the express train towards Harlem, when I saw the most amazing guerilla performance yet from my time here. Three breakdancers, my age or younger, put on a show in which a) the train was jolting around, b) no one got kicked in the face, and c) they were incredibly impressive. I would have given them money if I wasn’t jobless. I wish I could breakdance…

Nancy later told us a story in which a man on the train was asked by a breakdancer if he wanted to see something amazing, and when the man responded in the affirmative, the dancer a) swung around the pole, b) kicked him in the face, c) took his wallet and ran. 

Oh, New York…