It's winter in Sunset Park. The B.I.D. has strung up lights across 5th Ave. and set up speakers at the intersection to play songs in English and Spanish. I managed to send out holiday cards (via Etsy) and do Christmas shopping this year (via Amazon, mostly), despite a somewhat surreal work schedule.
Creepy salespredators from a company called IDT Energy have been prowling the building unbidden, trying to con people into giving up their ConEd statements. The scam is thus (from what I can tell from reading Consumerist): They promise to save you 7% on your energy bill, sometimes claiming to be representatives of ConEd itself, and then they switch you to them as your energy supplier. And they do save you that 7%, apparently, at least for the first month or so, after which they switch you to a "variable rate" plan that costs three times as much as regular ConEd service. The guy who rang my doorbell a few weeks ago complimented me on my pajamas ensemble: "Hey, nice t-shirt, guy! We're with ConEd and we'd like to save you some money! Can I see your latest bill?" I said no and closed the door on him, but, hearing him launch into his patter with some success with the old Mexican guy next door ("Hey, man, nice slippers! You speak English?"), I did some Googling and found a bunch of horror stories about that company elbowing their way into apartments, bullying befuddled elderly or non-English speakers into taking a real lemon of a plan. After sweating over it for a few minutes, I decided to go a little Travis Bickle and stepped into the hall:
"No es de ConEd," I told the old guy. "Es de otra compania. ?Entiendes? No es de ConEd."
"Yeah, it's cool. He gets it," said the IDT salesguy. "I explained that to him." I tried to explain it, too, but it didn't seem to get through to him. "No es legal," I tried, finally, feeling lame.
"Yes it is," said the salesguy, without looking up from his clipboard where my neighbor was signing.
"Esta bien," said my neighbor. "He say he going to..." -- he made a downward, swishing motion with his hand -- "abajar the... bill."
"Fuck it," I thought, and went back inside, feeling sheepish and angry for the rest of the morning. One of them showed up the next weekend, too, a chubby, bald guy, sweaty and panting from the exertion of climbing the stairs. "We're working with ConEd," he said, wiping the moisture from his head with his palm. I managed to talk him into leaving the building with a half-hearted threat to call the police, but I didn't feel much better.
There hasn't been a lot of snow, really only enough to collect into a snowball, which I stored in the freezer. Most of the precipitation has been the dreaded "wintry mix," which promptly froze into an icy cap on the crest of Sunset Park -- as well as a lumpy, hip-fracture incitement in front of the city council building on 4th Ave. There was a strange snow storm earlier this month that blew in an impromptu cloud of enormous flakes around lunch time, more or less filling the sky in Chelsea. Joe and Demetri and I were waiting for our quesadillas outside of Pizza Taco (a.k.a. Great Burrito) on 23rd St. and 6th Ave. when these big, fluffy snowflakes, about the size of, I don't know, gourmet potato chips, just started pouring down. They were so big you could snatch them out of the air and sort of re-throw them, which we did until the freak storm ended a few minutes later.
Last weekend, Nina and I took a walk down through Bay Ridge. I've been taking the train out to Bay Ridge Ave. on the weekends to pick up special cat food for Kitty from a place called Vinny's Pet Store. The subway ride invariably includes some kind of cute interlude with naughty teenagers riding their skateboards on the train and drinking beer at 11:00 AM. The store itself is not far from where a freak tornado tore up the street last year, and down the street from a Turkish seafood restaurant with a hookah and an icy bed of trout in the window. After picking up the cat food, we walked down 65th St. to Owls Head Park (apparently missing a dead body), following a muddy path along the Belt Parkway to this long promenade I'd never been to before, full of joggers and dog-walkers, with a view of the tugs and barges in the bay between Brooklyn and Staten Island. It was an unseasonally warm afternoon, and a strange, hot wind was blowing hard in our faces and forcing the pigeons and seagulls to bank out of its way. When we got to Shore Road Park, we turned and headed back uphill to the subway station, past the gaudy McMansions and luxury apartment complexes, past Vito Fosella's shuttered campaign office on 85th St. and 4th Ave.
I managed to send out a few holiday cards this year and buy a few presents for people. The Graham-Rutherfords have yet to actually celebrate Christmukah this year, on account of my mom flying out to California to tend to her parents -- my grandmother had another stroke, and on his way to visit her in the ICU, my grandfather was hit by a bus, crazily enough. They're okay, more or less (less), but, man. Crazy turn of events. She won't be back until the first week of January. So in lieu of a regular family get-together with presents, etc., I stopped by on Christmas Eve and we ordered delicious Indian food from Banjara. It's A Wonderful Life was watched, yet again revealing itself to be worthy of close attention -- did you know that Mr. Potter has a human skull on his desk in most of the shots in his office? I came back the next night, too, in order to eat a ham that my dad had been sent in the mail. Caroline and I baked sugar cookies, which are frustratingly difficult to make on account of having to chill the dough.
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