The Last Time We'll Ever See NYC

One of the perks of Boston life is the option of hopping a ridiculously cheap bus down to NYC for all the glitz, glamor and high prices of NYC without having to live in that rat-infested cesspool. It's even better when your friends Missy and Rob live there and let you crash on their Dolce and Gabana air mattress. That's right, nobody in "The City" would ever be caught dead with an Aerobed. So when we heard they were moving to the quaint Canadian hamlet known affectionately to the townsfolk as "Toronto," we figured we'd head down one last time to help them pack up their U-Haul and see them off, eh.

The bus ride down was uneventful except for the girl sitting two rows in front of us who was easily among the world's elite in the all-important irritation statistic "likes-per-sentence" (LPS). I estimate she was about a 4.5. I've seriously never wanted to punch a stranger in the face so badly in my life, and I've seen a few episodes of My Super Sweet Sixteen and Bridezillas. Luckily, headphones prevented any actual violence. We dropped our stuff off in their dee-lux 2nd floor sky apartment, and headed down to the East Village pub where they'd first met for their going away cocktail hour(s). Their friends were nice enough, but after a few hours of trying unsuccessfully to follow their conversations on wine, art, and poetry, Liz and I headed out back by the dumpsters to scratch each others butts and talk about how wicked awesome the Green Monster is, leaving them to enjoy their (what I can only assume were) Manhattans, having never seen a drink that wasn't a Narragansett tallboy.

Saturday we Tetrised their U-haul and then, having suddenly become completely the opposite of people described in the previous sentence, we headed out to the Guggenheim for an exhibit called "The Great Upheaval," which focused on the pre-WWI years. It was Kandinsky-heavy, and we both realized we kind of like his stuff. I had him confused with some other painter whose stuff looks like the scribblings of a child. Anyways, here were a few of our (non-Kandinsky) favs:

Les Joueurs Du Football by Henri Rousseau

Because those dudes look like total fruits.

And Eiffel Tower by Robert Delaunay

Because of the three categories into which I place art (Meh, Cool, and Badass), it is cool.

The museum itself was kind of the star, and I now have "rollerblade from the top of the Guggenheim" on my bucket list.

That night, we rejoined Missy and Rob and two of their friends at Keen's Streakhouse, a very cool old place with top quality meat. Missy, despite being very sick and and a pescatarian, troopered it out with us. Liz and I had the porterhouse for two but it would have fed three. The next morning we loaded the last of their stuff, wished them good luck in their new Canadian home, and headed back to Boston.

While we waited for the bus to bring us from the train station to our house, we overheard a conversation between two black people that would have made Rush's head explode. Basically, the middle aged guy in an Africa hat carrying a bag of frozen pizzas was the walking, loud-talking posterchild for the culture of victimhood railed against by my bootstrappy conservative friends. He went on and on about how whitey was keeping the black community down, gave an impassioned argument in favor of "reverse racism" (using the enemy's tactics against him, according to his definition), and went so far as to say that although he was sorry for the loss of life on 9/11, at least now people were "paying attention to the Muslims," and maybe black people should be setting off bombs to get people's attention. I very seriously considered telling the transit police that some guy was making terrorist threats (hey, if you see something, say something, right?). Not that I thought he was in any way serious about terrorism--the guy could barely form complete sentences--much less handle explosives, but I sure wouldn't have minded seeing him experience some real harassment from whitey. I was thinking the whole time that if one of the aforementioned conservatives I know would have been there I would have had to say, "OK fine, you win this round." But it made me think about a misconception I think many conservatives have: at least for me, I don't think all the people on welfare deserve it, (not that the idiot we saw was on welfare, he did have Red Baron Brick Oven pizzas, which aren't all that cheap...hey wait a second, maybe he was one of those fancy-pizza-eating welfare kings I always hear about...but I digress) but I am willing to pay for welfare in order to live in a relatively clean, safe urban area.

So in summary:
Overuse of the word like: bad
NYC: good
Steak: good
Art: cool
Reverse racism: no different than regular racism
Welfare: tolerable
Red Baron Brick Oven Pizza: good