HOW TO VISIT #NEW YORK

When I was a kid back somewhere near the gut of the last century, we didn't get trophies for perfect attendance. If you won, great - if you lost, shut up, don't cry and go home. If you had a birthday party, an event about as common as a total solar eclipse, you invited your friends, not the whole goddamn class.

Needless to say, we didn't have video games or cell phones so at a very early age we learned how to climb trees and how to get home on the bus.

We also learned how to cuss and spit and settle our differences with our fists and our elbows. We didn't assert our position on the social food chain with cute emoticons and cryptic abbreviations typed behind the scrim of a personal computer.

And so it was with great distress that I came face to face with the dire consequences of the contemporary condition of FOMO.

For those of you who still don't laugh out loud or who think omg is a flavor enhancer found in chop suey, fomo stands for "fear of missing out." It is an anxious state of mind brought about by the involuntary impulse to join.

We were in Manhattan recently to see the kids and the wife insisted on seeing some art exhibit by this guy from Burma who hangs taxidermied goats from cantilevered bamboo joists and gives them titles like Mandalay Bambi and Baby Hazel's Hang-up. 

Apparently the critics found the work "exquisitely executed (pun intended?) and eloquently understated". The artist was seen as "an original voice from a new generation of Southeast Asian sculptural virtuosi." One writer even described it as "the most monumental foreign visitor since the Shah." (One can only speculate whether he was referring to the 1962 or the fateful 1979 visit).

In any event, we, like so many others were bullied into believing that to miss out was to be hopelessly consigned to the intellectually unwashed and so off we went like lemmings off a bluff. 

And if that weren't enough we then had to go uptown and have lunch at this new trendy Ethiopian restaurant and wait two hungry hours to get in and eat with our fingers.

My wife ordered the beef kitfo.

I had the goat.

WHY I DON'T WRITE

Long before the personal computer reduced the ink pen to the plight of the slingshot, before telephones became diminutive amanuenses and coffee shops sold coffee and served it in sturdy ceramic cups most moderately educated people knew how to marry a noun and a verb into an enduring and meaningful relationship.

Nowadays the mere garnish of an adjective evokes such undeserved awe it's as if one were witnessing a barefoot Lama levitating to the song of some invisible bamboo flute. What was once a given among the reasonably educated now seems as exotic as a Capuchin monkey riding the rear of a randy Australian dingo.

And speaking of randy dingos, no less of an authority as ol' Wally Whitman reminded us that "to have great poets there must be great audiences." If avoiding the word so at the beginning of a sentence is the measure of a great stylist then I'm afraid the great audiences might be busy somewhere else. 

Why don't I write?

Why don't you tap dance?

THE WORLD JUST WASN'T MEANT FOR ONE AS BEAUTIFUL AS BUCKLEY FRIPPS

Buckley Fripps, date unknown

I knew Buckley Fripps.

Bucky and I go way back - long before the drugs and the booze and the Cousins of Helos.

Bucky wasn't always such a mess but like lots of talented people, he couldn't handle the demands the real world exacted from its most consecrated citizens. 

We'd go fishing together at Tioughnioga Lake and Butternut Creek and nothing seemed to please him more than gnawing on a blade of Kentucky Bluegrass while watching the sun rise over the Tully valley.  

Then came the record deal and his life began to spiral out of control. I think the turning point came when the Cousins of Helos opened for Alkyd in Watkins Glen (not to be confused with the Middle Eastern band El-Khid). It was 1984 and it was easier buying a kilo of cocaine than getting your car washed. 

The rest is such a sad cliché there's no point going over the fine points of his decline. Suffice it to say that by the late 80's and the proliferation of androgynous pop groups like Duran Duran and The PetShop Boys, the public was tired of COH's earnest sound. Bucky got into one bad fight too many and ultimately disappeared into folk/rock oblivion .  

I prefer to remember my buddy Bucky for his great music, particularly the incredibly moving song Freud's Vienna.

A TALE OF TWO WAISTLINES

I might as well just come out and say it:

I'm fat.

Not irredeemably obese but not exactly the ideal guy to sit next to on a plane.

The word fat, so short and declamatory, renders an incandescent condition fixed in a gelatinous fact. It has the odor of earth and the constancy of an archive. We fatties are fallen angels, shunned for our moral lapses and ridiculed for our intemperance. Never mind that we make up this nation's flatulent majority, the way those snot noses in Hollywood would have it we're merely walk-ons in their svelte world of elegance and anorexia.  

On television we're depicted as buffoons, social outcasts, tottering invalids or at best, world-weary detectives nearing retirement. To public policy wonks we're an unnecessary drain on the health care system, a ballast on the economy and a statistic cited as an international embarrassment. (Athough I've personally put several cardiologist's kids through private school).

To me, I'm just a plus-size guy who likes to eat. 

People comfortable with moderation are usually suspicious of the senses. Not us gourmandizing jelly-bellies. We energetically pursue and unapologetically indulge in the infinite variables of gratification. If you've ever made love to a fat woman you'll know exactly what I mean.

 Who in their right mind would deny the bliss of a double bacon cheeseburger, find fault with a french fry or turn down a tiramisu or a hot fudge sunday?

Frozen yoghurt on the other hand?
That's for children and for amateurs.