Tag Archives: New York

NFL prediction: The Giants are going to win the Superbowl

The New York Giants are 0-6. It’s not looking good. But it’s going to start looking good. Yup, you’re hearing it first, right here, I’m calling it. The New York Giants, after a dismal start to the season, are about to go on an unprecedented winning streak, coming back from their lowest point in recent history. They’re going to win every single game, starting this Monday, culminating at the Super Bowl. It’s totally going to happen.

It’s going to start this week against the Vikings. Not the first half though. The first half is going to be a rough game of football for the G-Men. It’s going to be everything that you’ve come to associate with the 2013 Giants, interceptions, incomplete passes, just bad football. The Vikings will be up at the half.

But that’s it. Once the third quarter starts, that’s the last that you’re going to be seeing of a losing football team. They’re going to come back and crush Minnesota, I’m thinking a final score of like 37 – 17. And it’ll feel good, finally, after seven weeks, a win. It’ll take a lot of the pressure off of Eli, maybe he’ll sleep a little better this week, maybe Coughlin will stop calling him up every hour, “Eli. Are you studying those plays Eli? Because you said you’d study them last week and we still lost to Chicago. Eli?”

Giants fans will let out a collective sigh of relief, but it’ll be anything but a celebration. One out of seven is hardly anything to get pumped up about, and they’ll go online after the game and all of their Jets fans friends will still be posting really annoying status updates on Facebook, like, “Hahahah too bad I wanted to see the Giants go 0 – 16, J-E-T- …” you know how it goes.

And even after the next week, when the Giants beat the Eagles, New Yorkers are still going to be a little wary. And can you really blame them? I mean, it would foolish to get your hopes up after only two wins, wins that were preceded by six consecutive losses. I still remember back to week three, and I read something like, OK, the Giants only have like a nineteen percent chance of making the playoffs. And then the next week, when they lost again, I read that the Giants haven’t been 0 – 4 since the early nineties. And then week five, week six, I’m sure it was something equally abysmal, like, statistically speaking, the New York Giants aren’t even predicted to finish the season at all, like somewhere around week twelve, they’re all just going to give up.

But three weeks from now, when the Giants destroy the Raiders, fans might finally start to allow themselves to enjoy maybe just a few fleeting minutes of subdued optimism. Three in a row is pretty nice, those losses start to recede in the rearview mirror of the city’s memory, and plus, remember how I said destroyed? It’s going to be a huge victory. It’s going to be like one of those 37 – 0 games that, by the end of the third quarter, people won’t even really be paying attention to the TV anymore, it’ll be too much of a blowout.

You’ll see the negativity, stuff like, “OK, whatever, the Raiders suck, and so do the Eagles. Let’s see the Giants against a real team.” And then week ten’s going to roll around. Packers: destroyed. Week eleven. Cowboys: obliterated.

You guys starting to get a feel for where this is going? The Giants are going to go on such an unstoppable tear, that nobody’s even going to remember those first six games. It’s going to be all about, who can possibly defeat the Giants? And only once the playoffs start, once they start making those video montages of the entire season, that’s when the early season difficulties are going to make for a nice narrative arc.

“Everybody counted them out,” that’s how it’s going to go, playing highlights of interceptions and sacks before detailing their unprecedented winning streak. And I’ll watch the video and think, everybody counted them out but me. I knew they were going to come back. I called it.

And this is me, calling it. When everything happens just like I’m saying that it’s going to, I’m probably going to be visited by all sorts of government officials and scientists, they’ll be like, “Do you have access to some sort of time machine that we’re not aware of? We’re going to have to bring you in for some studies.” And I’ll go, I don’t care. Because seriously, fuck the Broncos, fuck every other team, it’s going to be the Giants, winning the Super Bowl in New York. Definitely.

I saw a bunch of tourists having trouble crossing the street

I was in Midtown Manhattan the other day on a lunch break and I wanted some food from a place a few blocks away. I was crossing East 54^rd Street, and there was this family of out-of-towners waiting at the corner, stuck. It looked they wanted to cross the street, but they couldn’t get their feet off of the sidewalk. While they hesitated, cars and cabs kept making the right turn from 3^rd Avenue onto 54^th.

As I got closer to the family, the mom looked toward me, clearly frustrated, and said, “You’d think these cars would let us cross!” And I was walking pretty fast. I’m tall, so I have a naturally long stride, but it’s also New York, so everybody walks kind of fast. I didn’t even break my pace, but I turned to look at the lady as I stepped into the intersection, telling her, “You just have to walk. You just have to go for it. The cars will stop.”

I kept going, I made it across the street all while the lady stood there holding hands with her family, that distressed look on her face, me on one of the street and her on the other, both of us now separated by a whole line of cabs already continuing their endless stream of right turns. This whole interaction took maybe ten seconds, and once I was safely across the street, I turned forward and marched on.

But I couldn’t help but thinking about this lady and her family, were they on vacation? How long were they planning their trip to the city? Now that they were here, were they having fun? Sure, it’s a lot of filling in the blanks based on the fraction of a moment that we were in each other’s lives, but there was something there, there was us, there was a street, there were pained facial expressions.

I spent the rest of my walk imagining that family making it back to their hotel room later in the evening, they’d be exhausted, all of that walking around, nobody behaving in traffic like they do back home. How many times had she stopped random pedestrians to complain about cars? Was she giving that same confused/pissed off look to every single driver that didn’t stop and wave her along with a smile?

In my head she went back home to wherever she was from, her friends and extended family members would ask stuff like, “So how was your vacation? How was New York?” and not wanting to give the impression that they had a bad time, she’d lie, “It was OK, but everyone is in such a hurry. Everyone is so rude!”

And yeah, I’m in my head here, but this isn’t that uncommon of a thing to imagine, right? New Yorkers have a reputation of being rude. On season five of True Blood, this guy’s about to get killed, so he starts crying, hysterical, he’s like, “I never got to go to New York, to see the Big Apple,” and Eric the vampire says, “New York smells like pee and everyone is rude.”

Are New Yorkers rude? I don’t think so. I’m going to fault the tourists in this situation, that lady and her family. I’m presuming that they took this vacation and found themselves on the streets unfamiliar with the pace of everyday life. Unable to cross the street on account of traffic not coming to a halt simply because they were waiting on the corner, they reached out for a little sympathy from a fellow pedestrian.

But I didn’t give any. Imagine if every single driver stopped at every corner where a group of people happened to be waiting for a light. Cars wouldn’t be able to move an inch. Traffic would remain at a permanent standstill. There are more people than cars, and with heavy foot traffic, the lights are necessary to keep people in line as much as they’re there to regulate the cars.

I try to reverse the situation in my head. I picture me going on vacation to some small town somewhere. I’m driving along and as I’m about to round a corner, I see a family waiting to cross the street. If I just kept going, like if I aggressively made that turn without their consideration, they could look at me, they could give me that, “What the hell?” face, and I’d clearly be in the wrong. But I wouldn’t do that, because I’m not rude, I’m not an asshole.

What I’m getting at is that I don’t travel to other places and walk around acting like the whole world is New York. People from out of town should come to New York and be prepared for things to be different than the way they are back home. It’s not rude. In fact, I think if anybody is rude, it’s the person that travels around and acts as if every social code and rule is somehow universally based on how people get along from where they’re from.

I’m being way too judgmental here myself. I hate it when New Yorkers talk down to everyone else, like we’re so enlightened. As a waiter, I can safely say that a good chunk of New Yorkers are indeed rude. In fact, a lot of them are assholes. At least when they’re hungry. Does this just contradict everything that I just wrote down? Whatever, I’m probably being a huge asshole myself. Yeah, I just reread this whole thing, definitely, big-time asshole. Still, I’m right about the street crossing thing.

I hate the PATH train

I want to start out here by saying that this isn’t anything against New Jersey. I’m not going to waste my breath belittling the denizens of Jersey City or Hoboken. I’m sure they’re all terrific places to live. No, my beef isn’t with the Garden Sate. It’s with the PATH train, the sort-of subway that links Manhattan to various locations across the Hudson. It’s a sorry excuse for public transportation, and I hate it.

I’ve only ever taken the PATH three times, and each occasion has been seared into my memory. No matter how hard I try to shake the experience, I still find myself haunted by the little engine that couldn’t. Each time I’ve taken that trip to and from New York, I’ve found myself breaching the surface afterwards like a prisoner who’s seen the light for the first time in years.

If you’re not from New York, or if you’re lucky, if you are from New York but you’ve never had to take the PATH, you might think I’m being slightly dramatic. I’m not. If anything, I’m sugar-coating the experience. I can’t believe that people actually use this system as a means of a daily commute.

You start out at a regular NYC subway station, one that connects to the PATH. You can’t really find the PATH, and I think that this is a safety mechanism, constructed so that unknowing New Yorkers don’t find themselves accidentally heading toward the PATH. If you really must take the PATH, you have to follow miles of signage, underground tunnels that get narrower and tighter, all making you feel like the subterranean world is about to close in on you at any second, and then right before you really start freaking out, there you are, it’s the PATH entrance.

Standing in that PATH station, it’s like traveling back in time, in some other city, like Cleveland or Washington DC. Everything’s laid out as if by an architect who’s never heard of the subway before, or maybe he’s heard of it, but he’s never actually been to one, he’s only seen footage of stations on TV.

The ticket machines are relics from another century. The unfortunate looking piece of equipment that I tried to purchase my fare from read in stenciled-on wordage that it didn’t accept any bills bigger than five dollars. And then even after I went to buy some candy from the newspaper guy to make change, the machine almost refused to take my money. It was only grudgingly, after smoothing out each dollar bill, having them go in and out, the stupid machine making an obnoxious beep each time it considered, then rejected my less-than-pristine bill.

Finally it spit out a MetroCard. It looked almost identical to its NYC counterpart, but it read “PATH” on the back, “Cannot be refilled.” Whatever, I don’t want to refill you’re stupid wannabe MetroCard, OK PATH train? Getting through the turnstile was a huge pain. The reader ate my card, said OK, but then refused to let me through. Apparently only after taking your card out of the other side does the turnstile unlock. Why the confusion? Why not make the system uniform with the rest of the regular subway? Why does everything in the PATH have to be stubbornly, annoyingly, just slightly out of whack with everything else?

This is my biggest issue with the PATH. There already exists a whole etiquette involved in riding mass transit. The subtle flick of the wrist used to gain access with your MetroCard, the process by which I can navigate a touchscreen blindfolded to buy more fares, the way that the tracks are labeled so that you know in which direction you’re traveling from any station in the system.

The PATH takes all of regular subway convention and throws it out the window. I waited at the end of the platform because on every other train in New York, the cars in the middle are full while the two ends usually have some empty seats. But not on the PATH. In fact it was the exact opposite. I watched several empty cars pass by until the last one stopped in front of me, and it was jammed with commuters. What the hell people? You guys are all choosing to sit on top of one another?

And you get in the car, it’s not the same type of train used on every other line. These are like baby trains, it’s making me feel like I’m riding a shuttle in between parks at Disney World. There were these TV screens positioned along the top that looped the same asinine clips over and over again. Some genius transportation planner must have been like, “We’ll make the PATH train entertaining! We’ll put in TV screens and we’ll scroll through random pictures of celebrities for people to look at! And we’ll do games and stuff, like word scrambles! But we don’t want to make them too challenging, so we’ll cycle through the same three word scrambles every two minutes or so!”

I hated everything about the PATH. It took forever. It smelled bad. They don’t let you know in which direction you’re going to be headed, so you have to stand there like an idiot and ask people, “Excuse me, is this one going to Jersey?” Every public service bulletin uses the ridiculous slogan, “The PATH to success,” like, OK, I get it, you’re using PATH as path, but it’s coming off as really forced.

And what do you have to look forward to after having been subjected to one of the worst transportation systems in the world? New Jersey. Again, I’m not trying to bad mouth New Jersey, but come on, if I have to go to there, if I can’t get out of it, it would be nice if the blow could be cushioned somewhat by getting there without taking the PATH. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey should be ashamed of itself for running such a horrible subway. I hate it. I hate the PATH train.

I’m in a New York State of State

New York is the greatest city on Earth, that’s just a fact. And everybody knows it. Maybe there exist other great cities equal or superior to New York somewhere else in the universe, maybe on some futuristic planet, galaxies away, but I have no idea, I have no way of knowing if that’s true, and to be perfectly honest, I doubt it. Ask anybody from any other city, “Hey, you, what’s your favorite city?” don’t even bother sticking around to let them answer, because they’re going to say New York. You add up all of the other cities in the world, they don’t even come close to being one percent as great as the shittiest of city blocks in New York.

Like I said, everybody already knows this stuff, so I’m not going to spend any more time spelling it out. What a lot of people don’t know is that New York also happens to be the greatest state that has ever existed in this, or any other country. Yes, that includes provinces or whatever it is that other countries call their states. New York State is the greatest state there is.

And, yes, a lot of New York State’s greatness is due to the fact that our greatest city is New York City. So, right, that already gives New York State a ridiculous advantage. But there’s more than just NYC. There’s Albany, that’s our capital. And if you’re like me, you might be thinking to yourself, Albany? Really? Like maybe you’ve had to drive through or past Albany once, and you might have had to go to bathroom really bad and, yeah, you were running a little low on gas, but you just couldn’t get yourself to spend another minute there, that hopefully you’d have enough fuel to make it to Schenectady.

But therein lies Albany’s, and thus New York State’s, greatness. You see, I always look at inferior states, states like Massachusetts, or Georgia, when they were planning out their state hundreds of years ago, some genius legislator or state planner had the bright idea, “Hey guys, let’s make our biggest city the capital!” And that’s what you call putting all of your eggs in one basket.

Here in New York, we took all of the politics, all of the grimy, dirty business of state government, and we put it far away from our (and the world’s) greatest city. Let’s let New York be New York, (I’m talking about the city) and we’ll let the state legislators and assemblymen fight amongst themselves up in Albany. Because let’s face it, somebody’s got to gerrymander districts and dole out liquor licenses. Why pollute such a great, great city with such petty nonsense when we can remove it to somewhere two or three hours away?

New York State has so much more than just New York City. Like Niagara Falls. Or half of it anyway, I’m not sure what the Niagara Falls sharing agreement is with Canada. But we’ve got a border with Canada. We’ve got some other cities too, like Buffalo, and Rochester, and Binghamton. I’ve never been to Rochester or Binghamton, but Buffalo is awesome. Instead of Taco Bell, they have this chain called Mighty Taco. I don’t think they have Doritos Locos Tacos though.

And do you know what our state motto is? Excelsior! How cool is that? Do you know what excelsior means? It means, “Yes!” It means, “Let’s do it!” It means “We’re number one!” It means all of these things and more, basically it’s just a blanket word used to express any positive sentiment. I think about other states and their state mottos, and to be honest here, I don’t think I know any of them off of the top of my head. Wait, I just remembered, “Live free or die,” from what, New Hampshire? Vermont? It’s cool, don’t get me wrong, but it just doesn’t pack the same wallop as “Excelsior!”

I’m trying to think if I know of any other state mottos, but I think that’s it. Isn’t one of them like, “A great place to live!” or something like that? Like Maine? I have no idea. I’m getting bored just trying to think about all of these other states. More New York State. It’s the greatest. We’ve got like a hundred sports teams. We say hero instead of sub or hoagie. Whenever I go out of state and I order a sandwich, I always make it a point to say hero, and if somebody behind me orders a sub, I do a really dramatic laugh, like I point in their face, and if they say, “What the hell?” I’ll be like, “Ha, you called it a sub.”

It’s just the best, New York State. We’ve got the greatest city in the world housed inside the greatest state in the world located in the greatest region of the country, that country being the best country on the planet. Again, maybe there are some other cool planets out there, but based on the other planets that I know of, like Saturn or Mercury, Earth is definitely the absolute best.

Excelsior!

Hillside Support Facility

EDIT: 09/01/2014 – I see that this story is getting a lot of traffic from some train forum called SubChat. This story is fiction. I am a fiction writer and I make myself write a fictitious story every day. No, I didn’t really sneak into the Hillside Support Facility.

I grew up on Long Island, but now I live in Queens, so every time I want to go home and visit my parents, I have to take the Long Island Rail Road. It’s expensive, yeah, but I don’t have to take it every day, and so I don’t really have any reason to complain about the price, seeing as how it’s fast, it runs very regularly, and I don’t have to deal with rush hour or anything.

But it always drives me crazy, there are like four or five stops in between where I live and where my parents live, and one of them is this place called the Hillside Support Facility. Every time they announce Hillside Support Facility, the conductor makes it a point to tell us that it’s for Long Island Railroad employees only. And sure enough, we pull into this mystery train station, it’s like all industrial looking, like we’ve arrived at the second level from Sonic the Hedgehog, and all of the sudden all of these guys in orange vests and hardhats and work boots are standing up and getting off or coming on.

Every time it just drives me crazy, I want to go to the Hillside Support Facility. Why should employees get their own private train station? I’m sure they’ve got like cool soda machines and maybe an air-conditioned waiting room. Why won’t they let me get off? Why can’t I just walk along the tracks and see what’s going on? I’m not going to walk into any offices or anything, like, if I find some closed doors, I’m not just going to start opening them up and peeking inside. And worse case, I do open up a door and snoop around a little, I’m not going to just leave the door open after I’m done, I’ll shut it behind me, I promise.

It’ll be like I was never there. And these thoughts, they flash through my mind and I’m like, I’m going to do it, I’m going to get off at the Hillside Support Facility, but then the doors close and I’m stuck in my head, just daydreaming about the Hillside Support Facility, I’ve blown my chance, the conductor gets on the loudspeaker, “Next stop, New Hyde Park.”

And I mentioned before how rarely I take the LIRR, so it’s not like I can really build up some momentum with these daydreams. I figured, all right, I’ve just got to do this. I’ve got to go home, I’ve got to make a plan, and I have to make this happen. So I went back to Queens and I found this store by my place that sells all of those worker looking clothes, all of that stuff I was talking about earlier, the orange vests, the safety goggles, I was ready.

I got on the train and sat down, and the conductor started working his way through the car right away. “Tickets, all tickets please.” I figured, OK, I’ve got to make this look convincing, so I’m not going to give him a ticket. I’ll just act the part, like I’m working at the Support Facility, like I’m not going to pay a ticket to get to work. Right? Those guys have to be able to at least use the train for free. Right?

“Tickets?”

“I’m uh, I’m working at the Support Facility.”

“OK, I need to see your tag then.”

“I … I …”

“Your ID? What subsection are working at? What are you electrical? Maintenance?”

“It’s just that, I just … the Support Facility …”

“Wait here a minute.”

Shit. I really didn’t plan this out too well. I should have made it seem like I had an interview or something, like I was going there for a meeting. And I should have been way more casual. But then what about all of this working gear? I could have said yes to whatever he said, electrical. The conductor came back with another guy wearing an orange vest and a hard hat.

“Hey, where’d you say you work at?”

“At the Support Facility,” I tried to act even more casual, like I was talking about before, “I’m maintenance. Electrical maintenance. Support.”

“All right, well, I’m shift leader today. Stay close. What are you a transfer? Let me see your tag.”

I froze. Just then the doors opened up. We were here, Hillside Support Facility. I made a break for it.

“Hey! Wait!”

It was just like any other stop, there were stairs leading up from the platform. I raced up, down some hallway. There was a soda machine, but nothing special, just Coke, Diet Coke, Dasani. I checked real quick to see if the sodas were complimentary for employees. Nope, a dollar fifty, just like in the civilian world.

After the hallway there was a door, outside an employee parking lot. I ran past all the cars, there was a security guy at a gate letting vehicles in. I sprinted past him too, “Hey! You!” and then I was outside. I had no idea where I was, Hillside, I guess, and I had no idea like how to get home, how to get to a civilian train station, which direction I might start walking to get to my parents’ house. What a bust.