The mole rats all have double chins. I see them standing around, curiously shaped, oddly curved, radiating a combination of health, consumption, and accent. I can’t hear them, yet I know they have annoying accents by the simple look of them. On the streets of New York City, you often find them: ambiguously young, clustering about, talking simultaneously to each other, to cell phones, to themselves, to the air, whatever–just yammering away like narrow waisted curiously large rumped hairless rodents wearing fright wigs. When they swarm, you have to be sure you have a ready exit, or you can be caught in the vortex of their vacuousity.
Trust me on this one.
They all have chin wattle. It comes of unhealthy yet spare diets and a lack of exercise. Ladies, much as it pains me to break it to you (it doesn’t pain me a bit), I have no choice but to inform you that shopping is not an aerobic exercise.
…
Some nights there’s a special smell to the air of New York City.
Of course, there’s always a smell to the air of New York City. It’s virtually indescribable to the uninitiated. Denizens of any large city know that downtowns do not smell pleasant. New York City, however, has a special smell all its own. I shant attempt to describe the melange of street vendors’ and restaurants’ dubious food offerings, engine exhaust, ocean air, industrial output, electricity, ozone, and the sewage of roughly twenty millions of people. It is not describable. It’s only experienceable.
But some nights there’s a special smell to the air of New York City.
This special smell is to the regular New York smell as the smell of any other major city is to the smell of the air in the Himalayas. It only occurs after dusk, after the trash bags have been placed on the sidewalks but before they’ve been picked up. The air is clammy–cool without being cold and filled with a cloying humidity which soaks into your bones leaving one feeling cold and hot all at the same time–and still. The lack of circulation allows a buildup of scent like the stacking of sound waves in front of an accelerating plane right before the sonic boom. When you first step foot in it, it clubs you across the face like a week old rotten fish, and by the time you’ve made your successful exit indoors, one feels overwhelmed by the urge to bathe.
…
The damnedest bit of all wasn’t that he was roller blading down sixth avenue. Traffic was heavy and relatively slow, and the skater was more than fast enough to keep up with the ocean of taxis. Not that I can recall having seen it before, but the sight of a roller blader rocketing down sixth fails to be more than whelming. What caused my profound consternation was that this man–tall and muscular–managed, in the process of rocketing down sixth, to appear to mince.
He was mincing. He exuded minciness. He minced. At no point did he manifest the classic ice skater’s gait necessary for one on roller blades to maintain speed, yet he rocketed down the lane at a good twenty mile per hour clip. Minced down the lane. Minced rocketingly. Rocketed mincefully.
You understand my consternation?
I hear ya.
I used to have a monkey what minced. It made going to the mall with him a nightmare—everybody staring, assuming we were a freakin’ couple.
No sir. No more mincers in this guy’s life…
I doubt he was really going that fast, Beck. It was probably just the exaggerated chin wattling as he whoosed by that made it seem that way.
When I lived in New York there was this guy in Chelsea that roller bladed with his big bulldog mix around 15th between Sixth and Eighth. He wasn’t mincing though. He was mushing.
Understand it? I feel it. And so does Hillary.
Not really.
Would you have been mollified had he minced slowly?
I would have been mollified had his evident velocity been more in line with his evident method of propulsion.
If he’s rocketing he’d better watch out for taxicabs. They’d make mincemeat out of him.
Mmmm… mincemeat…
<Homer>
Well, don’t go to Manhattan if it’s so offensive to you, then.
Stick to whatever strip-mall paradise you come from.
Interesting, Marz, that you automatically assume that I find Manhattan offensive. Do you deny that at times it smells quite rank, or that it’s full of bizarre sights?
Manhattan is one of my favorite places on Earth. Still, thanks for acting like an ass, I appreciate it.
Beck, you seem rather, um, disturbed by mincing. Perhaps an unfortunate childhood culinary accident? One would otherwise think that frequenting large cities would inure you to such supposedly “bizarre” sights.
Beck sweetie,
Your inane post was mocked, and rightly so, by Roy at Alicublog.
As A. J. Liebling once said about another no-talent ass-clown such as yourself, you can’t write for free seeds.
Wow, Roy at Aliculblog took some time out of his busy schedule to make snide noises in my direction? I’ve hit the big time now! I’m so glad to learn I’m every bit as worthy of having my writing mischaracterized as are the big dogs. With such epic displays of mad textual analysis skillz, no wonder the left has a lock on academia!
Shouldn’t there be a comma after “Beck” and before “sweetie”? Just askin’.
You know those boys would NEVER write anything that a Red Stater hillbillycon might find obliquely offensive. They’re too sophistermucated for that.
Leeds man: I’ve seen far stranger in NYC. The strangeness was how fast the guy managed to go while appearing to exert no effort. He appeared, in point of fact, to mince. And I have no idea how he managed that. It left me sufficiently fascinated that it’s actually what inspired this entire bit.
Beck, as I implied at Roy’s place; the principle of the wheel, and conservation of momentum, can explain much that appears strange at first glance. Bit o’ wind don’t hurt neither.
As I responded at Roy’s place, are you always this bloody minded and overly literal, or is it only when you reflexively dislike someone because of their politics and can’t come up with anything substantive or germane?
But no, really, thanks for the physics primer. Seriously. Don’t know where I’d be without your contribution. Damn fine job you’re doing.
Mince, unaccompanied by proper lisping, can be compellingly attractive and yet limpingly repulsive as well. I’ve experienced that even in my diminutive burg, where mince is a rare but amusing treat, although it has become trite with the explosion of mince meat on network sitcoms in the past few seasons.
Hell, yes, I understand your “consternation.” As Herr Doktor Freud noted, it’s the sort of “consternation” that results from an unacknowledgeable tension between what you think you should want and what you really want. I mean, Bro, that there post had the hottest homoerotic subtext of anything I’ve seen or read since “Top Gun.” Tall, muscular, mincing… Yup, like a repulsive spectacle to us true he-men, yet strangely. . .exciting. Hope the girlfriend don’t bust in the john here and catch me pullin’ a fast one.
Note to future hacks: to deter the overly literal-minded from thrashing on your wittily ironic stream-of-uncosnscioussness musings, avoid use of terms that, in context, might be misread as pejorative. . .like, um, say “mincing.” Dammit, that African-American gentleman really was shuffling. But I suppose advocating some tojours le mot juste ideal to someone with a 24-karat tin ear for the mother tongue is rather beside the point.
Straight guys are mostly skanks bi or queer guys wouldn’t touch with ten-foot pole, much less a ten-inch…yeah, you get the picture. But the old faggot adage—“The only difference between a straight man and a gay man is a six pack”—is true at least half the time. Just ask Pastor Ted, or Mark Foley, or Ken Melman.
Certainly as a card-carrying bi my favorite tricks are guys who tell me “I’d rather die than take it up the ass” and then a year later scream “Touch that gland, Daddy!” Scratch a homophobe and chances are you’ll find a big old queen.
<Viennese accent> “Ja, so… Und how often are you zeeink zis homoerotic subtext in uzzer people’s writinks, hmmm?” </Viennese accent>
These musings on Manhattan’s olifactory wondrificulness are all well and good, but low amp.
I have to muse back to my punkeriffical days, some quarter century ago… the bathroom at CBGB’s… now we’re talkin’ thermonuclear.
On my last visit to the fair Isle of the Manhattoes, a museum visit persuing research for a history paper on the great underappreciated Alexander Hamilton, I immediately repaired to the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal. Having fortified myself with several Tanqueray martinis, a bowl of oyster stew and a side of jicama slaw, I floated over those mean sidewalks to my destination.
Beats mincing.
I’m a much more civilizacated man these days.
Herr McGehee (channeling the “Viennese quack,” as V. Nabokov called him):
Hey, the Doc’s the one who taught me to look for the latent meaning beneath the overt content, in both literary texts and in real life. Luckily, in this case I didn’t have to look very far, any more than I did in chickenhawk Dubya’s Village People routine (complete with overstuffed codpiece) aboard that aircraft carrier during his hy-lar-ee-us “Mission Accomplished” shtick. Talk about (well-justified) feelings of inadequacy on flagrant display. As for the Yalie grad’s penchant for cowpoke gear, it’s a fetish I shared, too—when I was five. Now the only time I see that kind of John Wayneish drag is at certain bars catering to refugees from Brokeback Mountain or their fanatasizing counterparts. Amazing how many of them turn out to be closeted Repugs, nursing a Bloody Mary at the end of the bar with that panicky glint in their eye that says, Please don’t let anyone I know from Out There come In Here.
Sometimes deconstructing these cultural signifiers is like plumbing the “depths” of the Dubster’s psyche: the inside is the same as the outside and it’s all right there in front of you. Thanks to Beck (or was that Becky) for making my job easy.
oooooh, paulk, could you send me the winning numbers for this weekend’s lotto?
Done deal, Ms. Katzen-stan. Ironically, the “winning” lotto sequence this week is actually some kind of esoteric numerological code about “losers”, which, loosely translated, reads, “Geez, them Republicans really got screwed in the last election, huh?” At least they can console themselves, per she-male sybil Ann Coulter, that the Dems are a “dying party.”