Dan Mooney

Today I saw a guy in a red t-shirt that had “Get a Life” written on it. Above that, a mushroom from Super Mario Bros. But it was a red mushroom, the kind that turns small regular Mario into Super Mario, and not a green mushroom, which provides the extra life. I nearly went over to talk to this guy about it, to ask about the inconsistency, but I knew right then that the t-shirt had won.

It was uncanny: A few weeks ago, a guy on my softball team brought up something that’s been on my mind for years, but seemed too random or petty a subject to address in public. Of course, this guy doesn’t go around ridiculing Whole Foods shoppers, so his thoughts in general probably aren’t as easily dismissed.

We’d just finished a game at one of the East River fields and were walking west along Houston to catch cabs and subways. A few blocks in, we’re suddenly walking under a city block’s worth of scaffolding, the Xs hemming us in on the street side, the piles of cardboard or wood or whatever the hell maybe giving some stability, maybe protecting the sidewalk from the metal posts.

My teammate tells the group that scaffolding annoys him. And I can’t believe he’s given voice to one of my deepest pet peeves. Finally, someone understands!

I don’t know what the deal is. I don’t know why it’s up everywhere. I don’t know why, once it’s up, it stays up for two years. I never see anyone on it. I never see anyone working above it. It seems to protect the pedestrians beneath it, and gives the men above it a surface on which to walk, but to me it’s just an eyesore, and all it really does is create more darkness in a city already too full of shadows.

My friend thinks it’s organized crime, if organized crime exists. As we walked, he told us his maybe half-joking speculations about these companies being fronts for those who keep the local government honest, who know what they know and are hired out by the city at enormous expense to throw up some mostly useless scaffolding and to otherwise continue to do what they do without causing particular trouble.

You know, it’s as good an explanation as any I’ve come up with. Better, even. But while I love a good conspiracy, I also know that there are some mysteries in this world, in this city, that even with effort will not soon be understood.

And just the other day, the mystery deepened.

Recently, I noticed a new block’s worth of scaffolding on my walk to the subway. The metal braces running between the posts made jaywalking nearly impossible, requiring me to cross at the very middle of the street, where the space was, if not only at the ends. And after a long winter, maybe the longest ever, the last thing I want when I go outside is to find myself once again in the shade. So I mourned the loss of another batch of sidewalk to the dark side and got on with it.

And even more recently, the scaffolding was gone.

I can’t tell you what work was done. Often, after a longer time, the scaffolding goes up and you forget what the building looks like in the light anyway. With this one, the scaffolding was up and down in about a week. And I knew then that I don’t even know how much I don’t know about this scaffolding business. But I also thought even more firmly that I don’t really want to.

It’s just over a week ago that – with all respect – the shit hit the fan in Joplin, MO. The images of the aftermath of the tornado are just devastating, saddening, incredible. There’s nothing funny about that kind of loss, of property and, of course, of life.

So it’s not for the joke that I bring this up. But with all the hockey talk going on nowadays, the impending relocation of the Atlanta Thrashers to Winnipeg, and the ensuing, eventual discussion of nicknames, I made the connection between these events and something I wrote here almost two years ago now.

In this entry, I wrote of the possibility of the New York Islanders moving off Long Island. I hear there’s progress towards keeping them there, but I’ve heard much the same for many years. Nonetheless, straits seemed more dire back then (things being relative) and I suggested they might move to Kansas City. And if so, I thought they might be called the Kansas City Tornadoes, and I even hoped they might.

It had a ring to it. It connected the city with the region, and also referenced the power and swiftness that the storms have. Now, of course, we see all too well what tornadoes can do. I don’t see the Kansas City Tornadoes happening. There are worse things.

But back now to something light – the nicknames. In two cases off the top of my head, existing franchises have changed names for the sake of their public image.

-In the 1950s, the Cincinnati Reds temporarily changed their name to the Redlegs. Fears of Communism were everywhere, as I’ve heard, and you probably didn’t want to be seen or heard rooting for the Reds. The Red Sox already existed, and the Red Pants would obviously have been too much of a commitment.

-In the 1990s, the Washington Bullets changed their name to the Wizards. I once thought of a team from North Carolina called the Sharpshooters. That was another fake hockey team, and I liked the pun, but looking back on it the big red targets on the front of the jerseys were a little outlandish, farther out on the ledge than even “Bullets.”

And then I remember the Miami Hurricanes. They’ve been so nicknamed for a long time, very much predating Hurricane Andrew. When that storm hit, causing all that damage and a number of deaths as well, it might have been awkward but there were more important things to worry about, and also maybe not so close to home that they’d go and change it. Plus, the team already existed, it’s not like the Panthers were unnamed and Hurricane Andrew had just happened and someone in marketing was glazedly watching TV and flipped on some lingering storm footage and thought, “Wait just a second, here…”

So, I’ll look forward as I always to do to the relocating franchise’s new nickname, if the new Winnipeg team will be the Jets, if they’ll get their history back or if, almost certainly, they’ll be starting fresh. The Thrasher (the Brown Thrasher) is Georgia’s state bird, so if they’re following suit, I could see the Manitoba Great Gray Owls taking the ice just a few months from now.

I was so busy being reactionary and over-the-top in my last post that I forgot (or neglected) to mention something that would have completely undermined my us-versus-them standpoint.

This just happened today. I ran some errands in the late afternoon and stopped by the ol’ supermarket on my way home.

Several lanes are open. I pick one where one guy is having his groceries rung up. I throw down the plastic separator and start shoveling my own haul onto the conveyor belt. Between pushes, I see the cashier bagging his stuff, then finishing, then helping him move it over to the counter.

There’s a counter right under the window by the street. Customers pile their goods on the counter when the food is going to be delivered. It’s not quite the opposite of take-out, but it’s about as far as you can go. You do all the shopping, the waiting, the paying, everything but actually schlepping your crap home with you.

It’s a neat service, and I see its place in the city. It’s unlikely an average customer is driving a car there, with backseat and trunk space enough to transport a huge amount of groceries. Cabs are possible but I don’t usually see them there for that purpose. You buy stuff for a family for a week, it adds up: No, delivery makes a lot of sense. I can’t speak to the delivery radius, but I’d assume if its deliverable, the distance is also walkable.

So, the customer in front of me heads out of the little aisle, past his groceries, eventually onwards to the exit. I sidle up through to the tiny little desk and credit card swiper, only at the very end seeing that there were but four bags waiting on the counter to follow this guy home.

I got food for the next few days. Three bags full.

I’ve carried as many as five or six full, weighty bags of stuff home, just shy of the breaking point of the plastic bags and my own ligaments. Sometimes I throw a six-pack in the mix to keep it interesting.

But here was a guy, years younger than I am, with no obvious casts, having arranged for those four reasonably-sized things to be sent home.

It’s certainly possible that he was in a rush to get somewhere, somewhere his bags might not have been welcome. But if the delivery was to be at all soon, soon enough for any perishables not to do so, certainly someone had to be home. Was it him? Someone else in his family? Why didn’t they just go shopping then?

If he was in a rush, why didn’t he go shopping later on, after his errand?

All this questioning from one split-second glance.

I could not bear the idea that this fellow, a fellow Emporiumian, a stand-up guy, an eschewer of the Whole Foods, was so lazy that he could not carry those bags home. Maybe I shouldn’t be spotlighting other folks’ lack of ambition. Safest to assume that this young man was doing the grocery shopping for his elderly grandmother, the one who lives up the block, on the way to his job as a bartender somewhere uptown. Occam’s Razor and all.

The closest supermarket to my apartment is a Whole Foods. I do not shop there.

There is a Food Emporium many blocks farther away. I shop there.

The Whole Foods is easy to hit on the way home from the subway. I do not shop there.

The Food Emporium sits a couple of blocks in the opposite direction of my apartment from the subway. I shop there.

The Whole Foods lets you bring your food home in easy-folding paper bags. Two bags is ideal, but it looks entirely feasible to carry four. Either way the transportation is simple, elegant, businesslike. The bags could be briefcases. I do not shop there.

The Food Emporium gives you plastic bags that, with enough weight, test and stretch the handles that very nearly cut into your fingers, even beyond cutting off your circulation. I shop there.

One time – one time – I went into Whole Foods looking for some chicken. I found only thirteen-dollar-a-pound organic, spoon-fed, what must have been superchicken. I did not buy it. I left there and haven’t returned, and that’s pretty much all I know about that Whole Foods.

But what sticks in my craw are some of the actions of the people who shop at that Whole Foods. As I was walking up the block to the Food Emporium, I spotted a guy, late 30s-early 40s, carrying a pair of Whole Foods bags, happy as hell to be who he was. His bag was leaking but that’s beside the point: The Whole Foods was a long walk in the other direction, and here he’s passing a Food Emporium that I took not to have had the extraterrestrial, uberhealthy selection of food that will make this man live forever that the Whole Foods had.

Good enough for me, but not good enough for him. Just because he feels superior, doesn’t make me inferior by default.

But I know where I live. Crazy is normal here.

It seems so odd, though. It genuinely feels like there’s a stigma shopping where I shop, in this normal supermarket, narrow because of the city but that otherwise wouldn’t be out of place in any suburb. Some online reviewers demonize it for poor customer service. I buy what I need and sometimes don’t exchange three words with the cashier. I don’t see what the problem is. Other reviewers ridicule the selection in the bakery. Of a supermarket. In New York City, land of everything including a thousand bakeries. I don’t see what the problem is.

Am I so unevolved? Is this bitterness actually just fear? It’s insecurity, and it’s more than that.

If you’re vegan, I get it. Maybe Whole Foods – only from what I’ve heard – has a broader selection of vegetables and other stuff that doesn’t take as good as meat. If you’re rich, I get it. Maybe Whole Foods – only from what I’ve heard – matters more in its location and panache than in saving money on food whose healthfulness is, I’m betting, not your largest concern.

Whole Foods has its place. Not everything is overpriced. I suppose I should accept the difference in mindset, that my curiosity doesn’t extend as far into food as does that of others. But the judgments are palpable. I say that the quest for status has gone too far when good enough isn’t good enough, when the cleanliness of a supermarket and the freshness of its food and the comparative modesty of its prices isn’t the be-all, end-all.

And don’t even get me started on Fairway. Fucking clusterfuck. Can’t even find regular cheese in there. Fuck.