Coffee Direct

I was looking for a coffee place in midtown east that was cheap and no nonsense. Because I am unfamiliar with that part of town I went to www.nymag.com for a recommendation. I narrowed my search by neighborhood, type of restaurant and cost; the third of the criteria shortened the list from five options to four. I had to choose between a kosher, non-dairy, meat free restaurant (I need milk in my coffee), a salad place I vaguely remember someone called a yuppie scum lunch time pick up spot, a place where "Conde-Nasties" pretend to digest whole foods and a place run by an investment house. I went with the lesser of the four evils.

So, today I am meeting a friend for coffee at the ING Direct cafe. That's right they have a cafe... in Manhattan... and they proudly serve Peets coffee and advice on investment strategies. When I called to find out if it were in fact a true cafe they tried to give me advice on banking right upfront. I am imagining barristas with their Series 7s and waiters who leave you tips... on the stock market that is. I hope the theme of the decor is fat dividends. ING even offers free coffee coupons to new customers, although I am not sure if they mean new banking customers or new cafe customers. Free coffee is free coffee, I just hope I can get out of there without being convinced to switch my accounts from Fidelity , who by the way don't even offer bagels in the office. Maybe I can get a copy of the WSJ since my delivery guy seems to be on strike.

Lost Baggage

I was reminded of my former obsession with luggage when I saw an antique leather case doubling as a side table on a home decorating show. Somewhere in my mother’s home, possibly succumbing to mildew, is a similar case purchased from a second hand store either in Seattle or Oakland. Throughout my early twenties I bought suitcases old and new. I searched Salvation Army Stores and second hand shops for vintage leather cases and carry-ons and decorated my room with them. One winter to make money enough to return to college I worked for bags store in a local discount strip mall. The sting of working retail was softened by my affection for the merchandise. I thoroughly enjoyed arranging and rearranging the suitcase displays and loved telling customers about our products. My sales record was phenomenal and I used some of the money from my last paycheck to buy a top of the line roll aboard with my employee’s discount. I dreamed of one day owning a full five piece set of vintage Louis Vuitton trunks. I thought I was going somewhere.

Evil Smurf

I have always been a scaredy cat with an overactive imagination. As a child I had nightmares that every night Evil Smurf was standing just outside my bedroom door waiting to get in and bite me. Unfortunately for him, this blue devils's dimensions were exactly one inch larger than that of my door frame. The fact that he could not get in the room, I imagined, made him so angry that both his eyes and razor sharp incisors were blood red. It seemed logical. As long as I stayed in bed half suffocating under the covers I was safe. If I had to use the bedroom in the middle of the night I would violently fling myself out of bed across the hallway to the bath room and click on the light. The trip was about 5 feet total but it seemed long and perilous. Once in the bathroom I had to wait for what seemed like a full minute as the florescent lights came on. First they would hum and pop, scaring the Smurf away, and finally light the room. The bathroom was a Smurf free zone. On the return journey I always made sure to flush and run at the same time; the flushing sound would cover my footsteps and distract the blue menace buying me enough time to get back to bed and safely under the covers. The the covers, door frame, florescent light and the flush were magic items that kept me safe.

I had safety rituals and protective totems for every imaginary monster including the local hillside dwelling yeti, the fox head peeping tom who could pass through window screens and the frozen leviathan from John Carpenter's "The Thing" living under the hall floorboards. Every night I was running through the house from room to room just to stay alive. As I got older the monsters only got more sophisticated. Large creatures developed the ability to shrink in order to get into closets, chest and even dresser drawers. They knew exactly where to lurk where I could only catch a glimpse of them. I longed for gullible Evil Smurf who was brazen enough to let himself be seen in full and got scared away by loud plumbing. I was unhappy that monster pathology had somehow changed.

As an adult I am usually able to control these kind of fears or at least I don't have as much time to indulge them- usually. Yesterday I was in the shower when I noticed that the door was open slightly. Neither my dog nor my husband were at home so I had the radio on to provide background noise. All of a sudden I got paranoid that there was a zombie, a midget zombie or possibly and an evil monkey zombie just outside the door. (I had seen at least 4 zombie movies in the past week and i have always hated primates- they have hands). I tried to peer through the cracks nonchalantly to see if anyone or anything were there. Then I thought - If he knows I am looking he will reposition himself so as not to be seen, let me just continue to shower casually.
Wait, what the f*ck is wrong with me. Am I crazy. Has my line of thinking gone to crazy town? I castigated myself for my thoughts. I had to get ahold of myself and regain some logic.

If there were a zombie of any kind out there- simian or otherwise- why would it care if I saw it? If that thing is going to attack, it will attack. I'm in the shower, I got nothing, no defenses, not even a loofah on a stick. Then I thought maybe he had a plan, wanted to add some finesse to the attack. I put myself in his shoes (paws) and tried to think how I would plan it out- a thinking man's murderous brain craving zombie spider monkey.
By the time I had figured it out the shower was over; I had lost interest and guess so had he. When I got out there was as always no one there, not even a sign.

Aloha Niggers

After participating in a conference on interracial dating I met with my husband and his friends for to discuss current events and finally got the full story about Dog the Bounty Hunter’s racist rant. Dog, The Bounty Hunter is mindless, fairly nonviolent show starring redneck with a criminal past, minimal education who hunts down minor criminals on the mean streets of The Big Island. Who could he call a nigger in Hawaii? I am not aware of a black community in Hawaii and I had never seen any black people on the show or even any dark skinned Latinos. Maybe he hurled the N word at some vacationing African Americans. Highly unlikely. Perhaps he was using it, like so many New Yorkers, as a synonym for man, dude or guy or maybe he was using it as a term of endearment, for the guys on his running crew. Could it be that he was joking around; despite what liberals and scholars say an elegantly placed “nigger please!” or “what’s up my niggers” can be quite comic. I tried to think of a scenario in which he would get the N word out Hawaiian style but came up empty, so I went hypothetical with it: If he had said it why oh why would anyone let it get captured on tape? Any such tape would be immediately destroyed to protect the show and the salaries who work on the show. It’s not exactly DVD extras material.

Finally, I let our friend share the actual story with us. Apparently, his son taped a phone conversation in which Dog did refer to his son’s girlfriend as the offending epithet multiple times. His son then turned the tape over to the media who made a field day out of it. Well some made a field day out of it while other fellow racists in the media rallied around Dog to try to salvage the damage he had done to himself. There is no way that he could have written the hollow apology he read on FOX; it was both eloquent and grammatically correct. I liked the finesse of adding an “aloha” to the black community. That means a lot to us. Can we really accept an apology from a man who doesn’t even love his own son enough restrain from verbally attacking the woman he loves with the ugliest word in our cultural lexicon? You have got to have strong convictions backed by a lot of hate to say nigger the way he did. If he must apologize he should do so for simply getting caught which is probably what he is really sorry about. Like Michael Richards and Mel Gibson, he can let his money comfort him until this whole thing is relegated to the back pages by some silly celeb’s sexcapades or until someone else says nigger. This should take about a fortnight.

The perverse thing is that everyone is so worried about Dog as if he’s any kind of victim. Some people even suggested that we should pray for him (we should pray that some brother doesn’t kick his ass on the streets) This is his creation, I say fuck him and let him stew in it. I feel concern for his son and applaud him for what he did. It was obviously a very difficult decision to make to expose his father as a bigot. It certainly must be embarrassing and I wonder how the girlfriend feels. I have a similar situation with my husband’s father and I only wish I could get him on tape proclaiming his racism. It thrills me when racists come clean and even more so when they say nigger because there is no going back. This kind of bigot outing is vital to a society which is constantly trying to sweep racism under the carpet. This country is racist, it was founded on racist principles and is unlikely to have shaken them off in a scant few centuries. Our public figures’ speech and behavior as well as our responses to them merely reflect this reality.