They're Everywhere

If you wanna do something right use your own cone-

                               A Cone Head on Saturday Night Live

The other day I visited the smallish upstate town of a leafy suburb, hoping for a quick and bucolic respite from the unending repair of failing infrastructure. The city streets now often are shrouded with soil, dirt and rocks under the shadow of intimidating diggers and other humongous trucks with scoopers and dinosaur teeth that gleefully rip up every inch of asphalt. Toddlers love this, are completely mesmerized, could watch for hours. See Cooper, that’s a big, big digger!  Look what it's doing! The clanging and grinding for everyone else is pretty much unbearable and traffic basically nightmarish. Sink holes spring up in unexpected spots at an alarming rate, no doubt from the continual pounding. I figured a day away would be nice.

Lately my own neighborhood’s turn came and we were besieged by torn streets, dazed workers, unsuccessful attempts to direct foot and car traffic, and giant sections of ominous, round, black water pipe lying around; imposing tubes with a formidable presence stacked here and there at the curb, patiently waiting their own turn to be placed inside the long caverns that the large trucks and deafening drills created exactly in the spots where you normally plant your tootsies. Finally, the ubiquitous orange cones appeared, dropped almost randomly from the heavens to warn and direct you, though that also made no sense as there still seemed no clear pedestrian path.

In such cases of course you wind up zigzagging across lanes, weaving in and out of slow moving traffic manned by cursing drivers so that you can keep changing sides of the street just to keep moving. Eventually you do find a sidewalk, or at least a sizable section of one that is almost walk-able, as they always leave at least one, no matter how skimpy or narrow, to ferry you (and double strollers and people on walkers and dogs and runners) the hell out of there.  Eventually you find that lone little line of poured concrete creating a path to an intersection where finally you can cross and head back to the chimera of unperturbed civilization- always tantalizingly visible in the near distance- providing an illusion of maintained stability, a kind of  yellow brick, undisturbed paved road to the  un-wrecked familiar.

I see the cones everywhere. When they are not guiding you along a stretch of untrammeled sidewalk beneath you they're usually alerting you to treacherous roof work up above. They appear on highways and parkways to make lanes suddenly disappear. Sometimes the cones are simply plunked solo to steal a coveted parking spot. Really, they're everywhere. But back to that small, upstate town in the quiet, upscale, leafy suburb. . . .

So after lunch I decided to take a walk- a simple pleasure, yes? As I reached the center of the main street however with its little roundabout, I noticed something amiss: it was the cones, as far as the eye could see. They were placed in all four directions on all the streets leading out from the center.  So omnipresent were they in fact that they began to suggest something akin to the alien Cone Heads from Saturday Night Live, those pointy headed, ineffable beings who emanated from a far off galaxy and hilariously tried to blend in. Honestly though, these cones were not like those other, funny cones from SNL, but more like a silent invasion. We're worried about immigrants???  How about the damned orange cones?? And to make matters worse, unlike their cone headed cousins in the city, these cones were lined up fascistically straight, exactly parallel to the closed sidewalks they so meticulously straddled, not scattered randomly about like city cones; all routes were cut off  to everywhere and it remained eerily still. The four little streets that streamed out from the center were completely empty and devoid of human life, though I can't speak for the squirrels. As you can guess, these cones did not blend in but rather loomed.

As I searched for a way to proceed on foot, it became apparent that each street had been dug up and the sidewalks temporarily(?) obliterated, albeit in an oddly neat and orderly fashion- this offering a glint of solace, even though you were sort of trapped in the roundabout. The suburbs after all are not like the city, but still. . . . It was one of those strange, dreamlike moments, along with the realization that obviously there was no escape and there would be no walk here either. You just had to turn back on your heel to wherever and forget about walking in this town, ever, or at least for the moment and probably longer- you know how these things tend to go. At least in the city there is always the vague possibility of twisting an ankle as you take a few baby steps and try to navigate the debris along a much too narrow, rubble strewn trail- but still a path- as if this were any consolation.  

As I headed back to the car I began to realize how hopeless the whole thing was. How from now on you most probably always would be running into one of these cone headed detours no matter where you went or how hard you tried to avoid that little army of conical soldiers and their outlying orange troupes as you attempted to take a walk or drive somewhere. Apparently everything everywhere has to be dug up all over again and restarted, rebuilt, replaced; re-broken, re-pounded, re-sifted, re-filled, and re-aligned. Everywhere. This is not fake news, but maybe metaphor. I hope not.  In any event, we seem to be sinking fast.

So how are your sidewalks doing these days?

And the ground beneath your feet?

Our Town

 I’m sitting behind the wheel of a car tentatively parked at an “Official Parking Only” spot (whatever that means) on one of the faux side “streets” of a large, outdoor, meandering mall, a marketplace designed to look nothing like the town square it was meant to evoke. It could be anywhere in America though this one happens to be in Westchester, and as in all such places everyone seems to be running. The day is cloudy and overcast, which somehow adds a welcome and almost noir touch to the scene. Other drivers of sound mind and fully functioning hearts and limbs have parked even more boldly- a notch up the risk category- in those hallowed handicapped spots, almost flauntingly in fact.

There is not an available, illegal, outside space to be found! I lucked out because I was cowering in the fire zone before the miscreant in front me sashayed back to his car like an insouciant mafia don and languidly pulled out, allowing me to creep up into the area’s last non-spot spot a notch down from the emergency vehicle lane. We rebel outliers have decamped here on the faux streets of the faux town because either we are sociopaths with total disregard for sign warnings, or more likely we wish to avoid the monstrous cave of a garage that swallows drivers into its gaping maw then frustrates the hell out of you as you try to get it to spit the car back out- in large part because the scanners never work. Some of the more devil-may-care insurgents simply walk away from their illegally parked vehicles on the street and nonchalantly stroll to their destinations. Most people run. I am out here waiting because the person I am with “ran in” to make a purchase. Run, run, run. . . .

Even those who come stumbling out of the multi-leveled, dark cavern of a giant parking structure with an assured “legal” spot seem to be hurrying in a kind of semi-somnambulant state. The air is filled with a sort of droning background noise passing itself off as a "song" that’s a simulacrum of the original Muzak simulacrum (remember the tunes of the Beatles homogenized to a cool whipped, barely recognizable melody in a freezing supermarket as you checked out the eggs? That would be like Beethoven compared with this stuff). The track or channel or outer space station from whence this horrible sound blasts a wavy, repetitive series of dissonant grunts, unintelligible moans and repetitive lyrics- some fast, some agonizingly slow- cuts through the sporadic rain slowly beginning to gently splatter the windshield and wafts overhead.

Visitors wander back and forth under the spell of the sleep inducing, indecipherable beat, trance-like and weary, weaving or running toward one or another of the stores on the snaking trail of wares stacked horizontally and lining the way; it’s a series of neat corporate igloos with brand names. I think people think they’re having fun. Well, maybe not. But they’re definitely acquiring stuff.

Like everyone else, I too like to acquire stuff and throw it out. But why can’t this happen like in those earlier, twentieth century Hollywood comedies and romances that take place on a fashionable New York avenue? Cinematic shopping outings with well dressed, perfectly coifed, silly women in little hats, elegant suits and impossibly high heels who breathlessly balance a stack of gorgeously wrapped and festively ribboned parcels in their arms as a doorman suddenly appears out of nowhere to graciously open a taxi door. So relaxing, so much fun! A kind of languorous shopping, no running! Can you imagine such an extravagant bout of retail therapy, at full price no less, with doting shopkeepers clucking over you and the most pretentious, smarmy, Fifth Avenue department store adding a touch of shock and awe; or much less envision squeezing your bunions into those painful, toe pinching “pumps” of yesteryear. . .  and yet it still seems a much more desirable fantasy!

Or perhaps a classic “Shop Around the Corner” jaunt in slightly faded black and white would be more to your taste, where the staff is like a family, the owner the mustachioed, beneficent patriarch, the setting a quaint little pre-WWII European town, the longtime salespeople comically competing; a place where Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullivan fall in love with each other in and out of the stock room by means of  some wacky pen pal plot device, where there are no parking garages because people walk everywhere, and personal attention is paid to each and every shopper, no matter how obnoxious the customer or small the purchase . . . .

I am whisked back to reality as I continue to wait and the rain drops start to hit the glass methodically like seconds ticking away in a Hitchcock film. Some of the people in the simulacrum shopping town I observe through my windshield- a goodly number of them mildly or wildly overweight and not very well dressed- are carrying little and bigger bags with recognizable brand lettering stamped across the stiff paper. These wrappings with the company names proudly ensconced on them make the purchases seem more important than they are; but the bags are all recycled and not nearly as glossy and shiny as in the good old days of planet destruction. Somehow this makes me sad.

But really, what are my choices? Spending hour after hour blearily sitting in front of a screen at all times of day or night, obsessively browsing and doing the work of store employees by typing in scads of  style or “sku” numbers, addresses and credit information? Then weeks later desperately hunting around the house for tape while grappling with the repacking of a hopelessly and messily torn open box, after you’ve even forgotten you ordered the damn thing in the first place because it took so long to arrive.  And all this so that you can run to the post office and return the defective merchandise as you curse out the seller and swear never to order online again???

Oh wait- gotta go!- a fifteen minute loading zone just opened up and I need to run in for something. . . .

Obligations

Like many of you, I no longer innocently answer the phone with the customary, expectant "hello," mainly because I no longer answer the phone. 

The robo callers have won and altered the cozy civility of phone conversations and personal communication perhaps forever. That awful phenomenon along with texting have kinda' made the whole enterprise of spontaneous, un-screened voice to voice contact obsolete; the absence of other social interactions in which we so casually and easily once participated have followed.

The other day however, either in a moment of weakness or letting down the guard, or maybe because I was expecting a call, when the phone rang I thoughtlessly picked up the receiver and naively said "hello." Crazy, huh? In truth, it may even have been a foolhardy, impetuous descent into morbid curiosity, a sort of devil-may-care rashness that caused me to act so spontaneously and incautiously. 

After a brief silence and quite a bit of static on the other end- a condition which made me think the call emanated from far, far away- before I was able to hang up a voice managed to identify itself as "John from Loan Obligations." John, the archetypal ordinary American guy, calling from Loan Obligations, a phrase intended to strike fear and loathing into the heart of anyone who is not currently in the one percent. I mean, who has ever not had a loan? And even if you were lucky enough to be debt free, you never could be quite relaxed with the lingering, ubiquitous specter of identity theft that hovers over us all and fuels ads on late night TV. The horrible thought of even more obligations that you may or may not even know about, designed to evoke images of millennium debtor prisons; Dickensian work houses twenty-first century style as you try to straighten things out.

So I've sworn off answering the phone, although the scammer's hook to get you engaged did seem kind of funny. Loan Obligations. Clever. Not as clever though as "Existential Angst." Think about it. This is John calling from Existential Angst. I dare you to talk to me in 2019.