NYC Coffee

With the prospect of not living in NYC for a bit I’m trying to hit up as many things that I love and I’m reminded about the little things that make new york, new york.  At 6:30 this morning I was looking for a bank of America and on my walk I past a few man in the cans but no BoA.  I was reminded of a conversation that I had back in the day when I was working at a company where basically everyone was from a different part of the country.  On my walk to that job I would stop off at a man in the can and grab a coffee.  It was a strictly business transaction with minimal chit chat but after a few weeks our comfort level was such that if I didn’t have a bill small enough for him to break he’d cover me until the next day.  The conversation with my then coworkers was about how terrible the can coffee was comparatively to their precious Starbucks.  If you are basing it solely on taste, they’re probably right.  If you factor in price and that the man in the can is working for himself, trying to scrape by and appreciates every sale, it’s far more of a toss up.  Not to say that Starbucks isn’t convenient but there’s something to the early hours that these people endure to get ready for the day. 

Back in 2008 we had played a show in Brooklyn which an open bar.  From there we ventured to Manhattan where someone’s friend was bartending.  We ended up closing the place.  After walking to Union Square and I had the bright idea to walk the 8 miles back to Astoria instead of jumping on the N train.  Bear with me I’m going somewhere with this.  My beer soaked logic was grounded in my strong consideration for running for City Council and on some level I thought it would be poetic  to see the city come alive.  Honestly, it was.  It was wonderful to see the ground work laid out for all the things we take for granted.  Seeing the newspaper delivery guys rolling up at 5 am.  Seeing people in power suits drag themselves into the office at 5:30.  The biggest one was seeing the coffee cart guys setting up at 4am because it takes a good half hour or so for their coffee to brew, so they have to be ready to fuel the newspaper delivery people, the power suits and the drunken idiots walking home.  

Drugs and murder

I wrote a little thing about encountering drugs behind the mini school where I grew up back in the 80’s which triggered some long forgotten memories of the neighborhood and what it was like. 

I grew up on the block of the mini school and we’d find some vials behind it when going after a foul ball or if the football took a weird bounce after an incomplete pass.  Vials and used condoms weren’t exactly prevalent but they were definitely there.  The elementary school that the mini school was a part of was one block away and significantly bigger.  It took up a small city block with the right half more as park space and the left half as the actual school building.  The right half had a full basketball court with what we called the pyramid behind the furthest hoop.  The pyramid was a cylindrical concrete structure that had steps cut into it every 18” or so.   It could have been more than 6’ tall at its flat peak.  Behind the pyramid was a handball wall, which has nothing do with anything relating to the story but more for you to get a sense of space.  A good 20’ before the hoop closest to the street was the chicken pit.  The chicken pit was strange even to us kids back then.  It felt out of the gladiator days.  A three or four foot drop into sand with concrete walls all around.  It was what you’d expect to find in camps where the kids fight each other to the death.  It was strange because if you were small enough to be intrigued by playing in the sand there was no way for you to get in or out.  Unlike today the playground equipment of the olden days NYC factored more with what could be done affordably and less with safety in mind.  So there was no ladder or any other way in or out of the chicken pit outside of jumping in and climbing out.   What I would imagine was installed for safety was some railing outside of the chicken pit so no one would walk right into the hole. 

Keep in mind that this elementary school only went up to 3^rd or 4^th grade so we are dealing with kids ranging from 5 to 8 or 9.  We’d hardly use the chicken pit as kids.  The sand was dirty and really after your initial use the novelty would wear off and it would be largely ignored outside of a marker for foot races which was tantamount in the hierarchy of 7 and 8 year olds jockeying for status.  Anyway, I remember one morning making my way to the main school building and seeing a small crowd of kids by the pit and seeing the yellow and black police tape all around the railing.  There were a couple of syringes down in the sand and come to think of it something worse must have gone down since the caution tape was put up but the evidence was still there.  I remember thinking that it was a cool thing, mainly because it was out of the ordinary but it didn’t have any impact on our days outside of the chicken pit being shut down either by an order or de facto since no one wanted to go down there. 

The scarier thing that had happened one morning on my way to the main building so I couldn’t have been more than 8 involved the pyramid.  I don’t remember if I saw it or if my brain put together a mental picture.  School started around 8 so we would have to get there by 7:45 to line up and get ready to go into the building.  Getting to school early was another weird source of cache between the kids.  On some level it had to do with hanging out and being kids, meaning busting on each other, saying things we believed were true but with only the limited understanding that kids have.  I would always try to get to school as early as possible in an effort to be cool but living a block away and having responsible adults around me wouldn’t really let that happen.  On this one day we were walking to the main building and see a large amount of people, police cars and tape all by the pyramid.  Apparently only an hour or so before hand someone was shot, (if memory serves over a drug deal gone bad but I’m not sure) and spread out crucifix style with their head on the top of the pyramid and their arms and legs on the steps.  Looking back on it with adult perspective, I don’t remember the teachers mentioning it or being visibly shaken by it.  I definitely remember that school wasn’t cancelled or any other deviation from the norm. 

I’m trying to reconcile whether it was because New York was tougher back in the day or if we’ve become more understanding of how trauma effects people these days.  It’s strange to think about either incident, the syringes or the body, causing a massive uproar by everyone these days.  Maybe it had to do with more of an immigrant population, maybe because so many people were doing drugs and getting killed in new york back then that it wasn’t seen as such a big deal.  I don’t know but do I know we’ve most certainly changed as a society. 

Work and shit

Being unemployed has caused a lot of my conversations and thoughts lately to be about work and working.   Whether or not work is inherent to being human or if it’s been an advent of society in an effort for people with the means to not have to work.  On a far more base level, I got into a conversation about when we each started working and my knee jerk answer has always been that I started working at 16 setting up an archive file room for an environmental company.  That’s not completely accurate though.  Thinking back on it a little bit more I remembered that I had done some entry-level office work for a few days at 13 or 14 but even before that I was a super of sorts. At 12 or so the building we were living in was sold and the new owner didn’t feel like making the trip over twice a week to pick up the garbage cans so he offered me something like $20 a week.   On top of picking up garbage cans I had sweep out the four floors and keep the front of the connected building swept and clean. The building also had a backyard, which wasn’t so much a back yard as it was concrete blocks and a wild overgrown assortment of weeds.  They might not have all been weeds but being a city kid I have no idea what the difference is between weeds and non-weeds.  Now what’s relevant to the story isn’t the back yard but rather how you got to the back yard. 

I’ll do my best to describe the building.  If you were facing the entrance-way you’d see two stone steps which led to a double door to a foyer where the mail boxes were. To the left of the entrance way was an iron gate that rounded to the doorway.  To the right there were the same iron gates except that at the end there was a swinging gate, which lead down to a tunnel, which brought you to a shared space with the connected building next door and then up five or six steps which then led to the backyard. 

To go off topic for a minute, we lived on the first floor and right by those 5 or 6 steps, which led to the backyard was the small window of our bathroom.  The apartment was a two bedroom laid out in a straight line.  As you walked in you’d be in a hallway with the bathroom greeting you.  If you headed left you’d hit the kitchen and then my room, which faced the backyard.  If you headed right you’d hit the living room and then through a set of French doors my mom’s room, which faced the street.  The bathroom had only a small window and up until this one night we would keep it open to vent out the steam that would build up after using the shower.  The shower wasn’t very big and my mom would put the hair products on the shelf directly in front of the window.  From the ground the window had to be a good 6 feet high.  Well, one night we were all woken up to a series of tapping.  Tap, tap.  Tap, tap.  Tap, tap. I don’t remember if I woke up from the tapping or from my mom screaming but in either case the situation became clear.  Someone had jumped and hung off the ledge of the bathroom window and while holding themselves up they started to move the various shampoo and conditions bottles away from the 24” window in an effort to climb in.  Thankfully mom’s screaming scared or startled them enough to jump down and run away. 

I think you get a sense of how secluded the area back there was.  To get back to the work part of the story, I’m sweeping up outside and making my way to the tunnel to finish up and earn that sweet $20 and then I smell it and see it.  I don’t remember if there was a no pets policy in the building or if people just didn’t have pets and at the same time the neighborhood didn’t really have dogs around.  I make my way down the stairs and there it is, shit.  Human shit.  How my 12 year old mind was so convinced that it was human I’m not sure.  Maybe because of the lack of dogs, maybe the size, I’m not sure.  I am sure that I was horrified and disgusted that someone could do that.  I might have stopped being the super in training after that incident because I was so horrified.  Now this memory came flooding back during this conversation and my adult brain definitely saw it very differently than my kid brain.  I relived a small portion of the disgust but then my thoughts were of what kind o situation that person must have been in.  Were they homeless?  Were they on drugs?  Was this alley a godsend?  A place of hidden from the street where they could have some privacy as they tended to a base need in a time of need. 

Drugs were around the neighborhood.  We used to play in a parking lot, which was in front of a small annex of classrooms for the elementary school a block away.  The school and the lot was called “the mini-school.”  The back of the mini-school was a little scarier since it was darker and there was significantly less space than there was in the front area.  I remember finding small vials and condoms when a ball would inevitably make its way around to the back and the older kids would make me go and get it.  I like to think I was a street savvy kid but I’m pretty sure I was still fairly ignorant about these things.  Even if I had a base level understanding that they fell into the categories of drugs and sex, I definitely didn’t have a handle on the logistics or details of them.  On some level all of these things probably factored into my knee jerk reaction of thinking the shit was a person’s, but now I’m thinking of the neighborhood as a whole and how during the 80’s and early 90’s where else would do you do things but not out in the streets in the most secluded of areas. 

The state of professional sports aka how the NBA is poised to be the most popular league in the US.

The NFL is king and has been king for probably a solid decade if not two.  Like every king before and every king to come, their reign will come to an end.  The key factors in bringing down the NFL’s dominance are: concussions, domestic abuse, drug abuse and hypocrisy.

I’ll start with concussions because they are they are the longest lasting and will have the longest effect on the league.  From the current and former players the effects are devastating.  The long term health effects from dementia to crippling nervous system aliments are only starting to pile up.  Think back to your childhood and the size and speed of the game and the players.  Lawrence Taylor looked big but not big enough to look like his uniform was going to burst at the seams.  You look at the line men and line backers today and they all look massive.  The game has also gotten faster and with offenses taking a page out of Chip Kelly and the Packers’ playbooks and trying to run more plays and running them faster.  Coupling these two things you get a perfect storm of more opportunities of contact and that contact is being perpetrated by larger and faster men.  Newton’s Second Law of Physics tells us that mass times acceleration equals force.  This increased force will only pile on even more injuries and likely head injuries. 

The domestic abuses cases  and violence towards children have been all over the news this week and very justifiably so.  Football is a violent sport.  Like anything that you do over and over and over again, your body and mind get used to it.  It becomes second nature to and almost instinctual to behave that way.  I’m not a reporter and I don’t have any sources but from what I’ve seen and read, it seems to make sense that players are using performance-enhancing drugs.  It seems obvious when you look at the recovery times from the injuries and how in other sports it’s months and in the NFL it’s weeks.  My point here is that these drugs have to have some effect on your emotions and your reactions.  Connecting the dots, hitting people over and over again professionally, taking HGH which effects your neurological state, will lead to hitting people off the field. 

I’m going to lump the drug abuse with the hypocrisy together because I will never understand how you can get a suspension for the entire season for marijuana when it’s legal in various forms throughout the country, while punching your fiancé will get you two games.  HGH which caused baseball’s black eye a decade ago, has just been added to NFL’s drug policy.  Just now.  Let me repeat, JUST NOW!  How does this happen?  Actually it’s easy how it happens.  The league is more concerned about making money than it’s players.  Bigger, stronger, faster players make the games more interesting and sell more jerseys, sell more advertising and keeps the owners happy.  Concussions have to be been under reported because of the pride of putting yourself second to the good of the team. Players have repeatedly played through concussions and had been encouraged to do so.  I’m all about giving maximum effort, the importance of team and something bigger than yourself, that’s what sports are all about, but at the same time you have to protect yourself for the rest of your life.  The average career length of an NFL player is 3 years.  I think about how debilitating it must be to only get three years professionally.  You’ve worked your entire life to get only 3 years of earning power and then to have health problems for the rest of your life. 

You can see that the NFL has problems.  The biggest one is the future.  I wouldn’t let my imaginary kids play football at this point.  Maybe pee wee leagues but that’s mainly because the contact is minimal and more adorable than violent.  If parents agree with me and don’t let their kids play it’s going to be a thinner talent pool to draw from.  Thinner pools mean lower quality in the product. Thinking further ahead if kids aren’t playing the sport and the sport a lower quality, it means that the popularity should diminish.  As much as people like to saying they are doing nothing, there’s no such thing.  Time is a zero sum game.  If you aren’t watching football you’ll be doing something else, if you are a sports fan than more likely than not you’ll watch another sport, which leads me to the NBA.

 The biggest story of the NBA off season was LeBron James returning to the Cavaliers.  Arguably the league’s biggest villain redeems himself in a magnanimous fashion, flipping the story and reclaiming public opinion (on a side note that adds to LeBron’s popularity and good will is going back to the 23 and not making people buy new jerseys). He’s back to being the most liked athlete and playing his best basketball, which is important because there’s something to being the best that resonates with America.  As much as we root for an underdog, we like being the favorite.   We like rooting for the big names, the marketable faces.  Think about those names.  The guys you instantly recognize by only their first or their last name.  LeBron, KD, Kobe, Melo, Blake, Curry, Kyrie, Rose, Dwight, the list goes on.  I can’t think of that many players in any other sport.  Speaking of faces, not having to wear helmets make the NBA and MLB players more recognizable. 

Thinking about long term health, you see players in the NBA playing into their late 30’s.  Outside of baseball I think basketball has the longest  average career length.  On top of long careers, the quality of life after playing is more normal. 

Technology has permeated into every aspect of our lives and we are able to share whatever is interesting or important to us instantaneously with that highlights are key to the future.  Getting vineable, youtubeable highlights will lock in fans.  It’s all about immediate gratification and getting likes for sharing.  With so much scoring in the NBA versus the other sports the likelihood of highlights increase.  We are offensively focused when it comes to highlights. 

The NFL has come under fire this week for how badly they handled the controversies of the past few months.  On the flip side the NBA was lauded for the lifetime ban of Donald Sterling after horribly racist comments came to light.  Similarly some questionable comments that have come out of the Atlanta Hawks front office this week and the culture of league is to report any missteps and deal with them.  The NFL policy seems to be cover things up and hope no one finds out. 

I have barely touched on baseball as the contender to the NFL’s crown and the reason for that is we have evolved or devolved to a state of shorter attention spans.  Baseball is too long, too stodgy, too boring to regain it’s position as America’s pastime. 

You can see that the NFL has short term and long term problems.  The NBA with it’s stars, fast pace, highlights and friendliness towards technology is in prime position to succeed the NFL as the most popular league in the US.