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infidel weed
Sunday, September 23 2001
Gretchen and I were out and about on 7th Avenue in Park Slope Brooklyn this afternoon, mostly for pizza at the Big Pizza Café. There are three booths in the restaurant with tile mosaic labels. One label reads "LOVE", another reads "PEACE" and then there's one booth that abuts the window; two people cannot sit across from one another here and instead get a front row seat to the goings on of 7th Avenue. This booth is labeled "COOL." We sat here, looking at a sad dog with a patriotic collar tied to a parking meter.
Behind us a mother sat with her young children. The kids had apparently just learned how to fabricate their very own knock-knock jokes. "Knock Knock!" one would squeal. "Who's there?" the mother would sigh. "Poopy!" the kid would shout. "Poopy who?" the mother would ask. Then there'd be a pause, because the kid had yet to think up a good punch line. Then it arrived, in essay form, "Poopy on pizza with strawberries, on your face, on the table, with tomatoes and cheese!" There were several more knock knock jokes told, all of them featuring Poopy at the door. Eventually mom had to say, "Okay, this is going to be the last knock knock joke for now."
As we walked past a 7th Avenue real estate office, we examined the prices for a variety of properties advertised in the window. This was something we did often back in August when we thought we'd be needing a bigger place. But things have worked out well space-wise and we've decided that for a slight increase in space we'd have to come up with $100,000. So when we look at real estate prices these days, it's mostly to see what Gretchen's brownstone co-op is worth. This was the first time we'd checked prices since the attack on the World Trade Center, and what a difference the collapse of those towers has made! Suddenly similar properties in Gretchen's neighborhood are in the sub-$280K territory; they once stood at around $325K. You could see the prices were fresh; they were written on tiny bits of sticky paper and stuck on top of whatever the old prices had been. I'd thought that with the sudden loss of 20% of lower Manhattan's commercial real estate there would be a run on Brooklyn commercial real estate, and that there would be a flight of residents to Brooklyn as well. But evidently this isn't happening. The people who are fleeing Manhattan are fleeing the area entirely, moving with their office space to places much less likely to be attacked: Jersey City and Hartford. For our part, Gretchen and I have been talking a lot about the virtues of Pittsburgh. Hundreds of American skyscrapers will be toppled before Osama bin Laden gets around to sending his not-especially-cowardly henchman after the Cathedral of Learning. Mind you, I love New York as much as I've ever loved any big city, but it's just no fun sitting around wondering if the sound you hear overhead is that of a gleeful terrorist dusting your neighborhood with anthrax and you're just another infidel weed rooted in America.
In the evening Gretchen's friend Ray came over with his dog Suzy and Gretchen and he played a few games of Boggle Deluxe while I installed Mandrake 8.0 on my Linux box. (I have to say, Mandrake Linux is nearly as easy to install and configure as Windows NT 4.0!) Later ray was telling us about his gloomy job situation. Up until the "Attack on America," he worked as a waiter at a restaurant directly across the street from the World Trade Center. Now that restaurant lies in ruins and many of his former tip-payers are dead. And it's not like he can turn around and get another waiting gig; restaurants aren't exactly crowded with customers these days. He doesn't know what he's going to do now; one thing he's considering is become an air marshal. He already knows a number of useful martial arts moves.
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