season's tidings of joy and goodness...

...and stuff.

Okay. Let's be honest with each other. It is clear to me, as it should be to you who attempt to read this on a regular basis, that my fascination with non-blogging is diminishing. I knew it was going to happen and, when I started, I actually told people it was inevitable.
It's my way. I get very excited about one media or another, then begin to lose interest and get involved in something else. It just happens.
If you want to keep up to date with the periodic postings that I am sure will continue to drip and drop onto swarveyland, I suggest you subscribe to the feed so you don't have to keep checking, just salivating for more over-wordy goodness.
Or don't. Whichever.

But, for today, there is a new posting. Yay!
Ready?
Here it is.

Swarvey and Jenn Go to New York

For the Christmas holiday, Jenn took me to New York to stay at her uncle's house which is very close to where she grew up. I've never seen where she grew up, but she describes a blessed upbringing.
Jenn is one of those people who I do not begrudge having a blessed upbringing, because she is aware that she had a blessed upbringing and is grateful for it.
She drove me through her neighborhood on Christmas morning. She grew up in and around Scarsdale.
If you don't know what Scarsdale is, like I didn't, and aren't likely to have someone drive you around it, like I did, but are curious what it looks like, like I was, just rent a copy of Home Alone and look at the house and neighborhood Kevin and his family live in. Actually, just think about where people live in John Hughes movies in general and you'll have a good idea what Scarsdale looks like.
Except where Bender lived. I don't think many people in Scarsdale get cigar burns on their forearms for spilling paint in the garage.
It was a nice drive and I'm glad I finally got to see where Jenny grew up.

On Christmas Eve, we took the train to the city. The city of New York. Manhattan. Jesus, keep up will you?
I think if I lived there, I would have a lot more stuff to non-blog about, but I would also go insane. Which I could then non-blog about, thereby perpetuating almost infinite non-blogging.
Here are some of the things that happened in Manhattan.
I'm not so much of a country bumpkin to not realize that there are a hell of a lot more homeless people in New York. I get that there are. What amazes me about them is how nonchalant most of them are about being homeless.
Like here, a homeless dude will try to find a place to stay warm and dry and be left alone.
There, he might wrap himself up in some towels and packing blankets and build a campfire in the middle of the sidewalk like he was riding on top of the Polar Express.
One fellow was looking for change and attempted to appeal to the holiday spirit of the passersby by singing a Christmas carol.
Take the song Deck the Halls. You know it? Sing it to yourself.
Now, imagine the song is being sung by Animal from the Muppets.
Now, imagine Animal only singing the Fa-La-La-La-La part. Over and over.
Loudly.
Now imagine Animal is a six foot three homeless dude.
That's pretty much what was going on.
He wasn't getting a lot of change that I could see.

Jenn and I walked to Rockefeller center, because it's a law or something. We were on our way to the skating rink when a smallish guy, in a lot of black all-weather gear stopped us.
"Sorry sir.", he said. "We're filming here. You can't go any further."
I noticed a lot of other people just walking by us, not being stopped. What was this?
He told me that, while it was obvious we were a happy couple, my lovely wife was going to leave me.
Okay. Anyone who knows me knows how much I love listening to people talk stupid talk. I let him keep talking.
He told me that, she was going to leave me, but there was something I could do to get her back. All I had to do was make a promise.
What was the promise going to be? Was this a Jesus thing? Where is this guy going?
What I had to promise, he said, was to never pull my pants down and masturbate in public again.

I'm not kidding. Ask Jenn. Go on. Ask her.

Clearly, there was some kind of scam going on here. I'm too curious about stuff to just walk away. Jenn was already way out of this conversation and so ready to go. I had to see what was going on.
Also, being infused as I was with the Christmas Spirit, I decided to not tear into the guy for using such a horrible, offensive joke. He was like the worst stand up comic you've seen. Just saying shocking stuff to elicit a response. His motivation was what was baffling me.
I looked at the identification around his neck. He saw me look and dropped the facade.
He was selling hats for a soup kitchen.
Fine. So you want to sell hats for 10 a piece to benefit a soup kitchen. They weren't crappy hats. We got a pink one with NYC on the front for my daughter. I probably would have bought one anyway if he had just been forward.
I just don't get the motivation behind the joking, especially the flavor of joking he decided to use.
If someone told me someone had used such a joke on them with their wife standing there and that they decided to punch the joker in the face for it, it might have said their response was a little over the top, but not much.
I bit my tongue and moved on, then was pissed at myself all day for not telling the little dork where to screw himself.
Ah well.
I was wearing my black Doc Marten's. My black Doc Marten's are not designed for protracted walking sessions around New York. They're designed to wear so you look tough so other people won't waste your time by talking to you.
I guess the joker had been too short to see them.
Anyway, I wanted to get a new pair of boots while we were there. I figured I could find something cool at a reasonable price.
Jenn took me into a shoe store that looked like a Peruvian spice market.
I'm not sure what that means but it's what comes to mind.
Guys who worked there were running around getting boxes of shoes and quoting prices, apparently, on the fly. There were 40,000 customers and six working-there guys. But somehow the working-there guys got the shoes to the people who were looking for them. I got better service there than I do in a 1:1 exchange at Foot Locker.
We found a nifty pair of a different style of Docs. Slip on with actual support in them. They were great.
While I was trying them on, someone decided to talk to me.
He was a pleasant enough fellow, I guess. Told me I shouldn't get the Docs, but that I should try Frye boots. He said that he was 5 foot 4, but that he got 3 inches out of the Frye boots, so that when he wears them, he looks like he is 5 foot 7.
I wanted to thank him for wrapping up the math for me, but he kept talking.
He said he got them on line, and that he had gotten a different pair on line first, but when he got them, one boot was a little bigger than the other boot, so he had to send them back, but that's the risk you take when you shop on line. Then he ordered the Frye boots which make him look 5 foot 7.

Again. Not kidding. Ask Jenn.

I said, "Okay! Hey! Thanks!"

And he walked away on his tiptoes so he wasn't exactly on face-to-crotch level with the grown-ups.

So I bought me some nice boots.

We left and continued to walk around. It was one of the most pleasant days in my recent memory.

Towards the end of our journey, a dude walked up to me saying, "Sir? Sir! Sir?", while snapping a 20 dollar bill in my face. I deduced that this was going to be a making-change-confuse-the-country-bumpkin scam, so I made like a real New Yorker and looked straight ahead and kept walking.

I know exactly what the problem is. I look at too much stuff. I am curious about things so I look at them. And they see me looking. And eye-contact is made. And that's it. They see an open door and charge on in.
Jenn is different. Hell, I could walk up to Jenn on the street and she might not even see me. She is in a New York zone. She sees what she needs to see and that's it. Everything else is beyond peripheral.

But she doesn't get all kinds of crazy crap to non-blog about.
So there.