WE'RE NOT IN BROOKLYN ANYMORE

I woke up this morning to what I thought was my landlady's small children chasing each other upstairs. We have an unspoken agreement with her. We don't complain about her children dropping bowling balls on the wooden floor above us, and in return, she says nothing about our drunken chorus of Bon Jovi's Livin on a Prayer at 5am.

It turns out it wasn't the kids trying to kill each other. I looked outside my back door to find that we were right in the middle of a rocking thunderstorm. Unfortunately, I had to go to work via subway. Twenty minutes later, I found myself trapped in a wet smelly carriage, with no room to move and no sign of the train going anywhere anytime soon. I wanted to slit my wrists with a dull rusty butter knife. An hour and some change later, the announcer finally explained to us that the Manhattan bridge was flooded. I happened to be one of the lucky few that made it to the subway before they closed the entire Brooklyn system, ensuring that anyone who had woken up after I did, was forced to stay home. You can imagine at that point how thrilled I was to have made the cutoff.

When arrived at work I was greeted with a kitchen staff that was just as cheerful as I was. The kitchen had flooded and the sewage backed up into the bar area, creating the most vial atmosphere in which I would be spending the next 8 hours. The cleaning crew came in and set up some giant fans behind the bar, which I dubbed my "swamp boats." I didn't understand why we were staying open, considering no one could get to Manhattan since the subways were shut down. As I predicted, we were dead all day. By four, the D train was running again, and I returned home to survey the damages from the storm.

There was glass all over my back porch from the other buildings that had been struck by debris. My roommate and I walked around our neighborhood (Sunset Park) and any doubt that this "might have been a tornado" was put to rest. Trees everywhere were up-rooted, and re-located. The building behind us was completely wrecked by a tree, and down the street the top floor of a home looked like a doll's house. It's walls were missing completely, and the furniture was still intact.

From there we walked to the grocery store, because when a tornado touches down in Brooklyn, it's time to start stocking up for the end of the world.

The pictures on this blog I took, but here's the news link if anyone wants to hear the story: (there's a video clip)

http://wcbstv.com/topstories/local_story_220172727.html.

SUBWAY SATAN

I've seen my share of interesting characters on the subway. There's the cross-eyed man whose earth-shaking burps take place every 7.25 minutes and register a 4.1 on the Richter scale. In between burps the preachers are trying to get a word in about saving us all from hell by finding Jesus. Everyone has an incredible urge to throw them off the train. And of course, there's all ways your token harmless bum, begging for change or pissing on himself at the end of the carriage.

All of them are quite harmless of course, and I have never been afraid of how they might act. This weekend however, I ran into one creepy guy that I thought was going to hack me to bits with an axe.

He was a balding, overweight white man, who was staring out the window into nothing. I had no idea what he was looking at so intently since underground is only darkness. My friend who was sitting next to me pointed out that the man was actually watching the reflection to see if anyone was looking at him. He was mumbling random incoherent babble. Or so I thought.

He shook his head one way as if trying to get bad thoughts out of his mind, and then looked at me, with eyes as black as can be, each going in different directions and said "White supremacy". Great, I'm sitting across from a crazy Nazi, who was now hissing at us. The man must have heard my friend say "let's get off before this guy tries to kill us." At that moment, he leaped up out of his chair and came towards us, but then changed directions and went for the door.

We got off only to see the crazy eyed man turn around, and with both black eyes focused directly on me, he leaned up against the pole and smiled a grin that looked like a mix between the Joker and the Black Dahlia, ear to ear.

I started running up the stairs. I swear, that man was possessed by Satan himself.