A Tale of Two Parks

A Tale of Two Parks. On October 28, 2011, I visited NYC for the 1st time in 3 years. I walked from Penn Station to the East Village, pausing to photograph a few places I had lived in the city at different times over 11 years (152 W. 20th, 111 E. 7th, 54 E. 1st), then down Orchard and through Chinatown, finally arriving at Zuccotti Park. At the corner of Broadway and Liberty Street, I choked up and started to cry. It felt very strange to weep in public, surrounded by so much activity, so many people I didn't know, but over the few hours I spent in Zuccotti Park I broke down several times. Later in the day, near sunset, I found myself high above another park, in the living room of some very nice people (though decidedly of the 1%), who live on Central Park South. I pulled out my little video camera and went to the window to capture some juxtaposition. Somehow the 2nd movement of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony seemed to capture the mood of the day. A work in progress.

Annoyingness

People may be naturally annoying. Maybe it’s knitted into our DNA. But the tools available for us to express our annoying natures seem to be proliferating daily, from Silicone Valley and Alley, Nokia and Sony, Detroit and China, Casio and Mattel.

Lets take cell phones. Fifteen years ago they were rare. Movie stars had them. CEOs and Senators and rich people had them. They were a status symbol. But now 3rd graders have them, so that parents can track their busy comings and goings to self improvement sessions with GPS. How annoying is that entire situation? Do 3rd graders really need self-improvement? What ever happened to childhood?

Anyway, cell phones have ceased to be a status symbol. But many people don’t seem to have gotten the memo. Note the guy walking down the boardwalk giving a movie review at several bars of volume above what’s necessary to be heard on the other end. He seems to be making sure that I can hear him, even though he avoids eye contact, as if perhaps he’s on with Ebert or Roeper or Robert Redford. I want to stop him and tell him how ridiculous and annoying he is. But I don’t. Instead, I avoid eye contact too, as if I haven’t even registered his little performance, which seems to make him broadcast even louder.

Everywhere you turn there are people talking on their cell phones as if across a loud noisy room, about their boyfriends and girlfriends, shopping lists, latest vacation, latest pair of shoes, latest run-in with a difficult friend or family member, latest encounter with a turd that wouldn’t flush down the toilet properly, imagining apparently, that if your shit doesn’t sink, it’s only a matter of time until it doesn’t stink as well.

One of the worst devices available for people to practice their annoyingness skills is the automobile. It’s been around for a century now, and has always been annoying, but people keep finding clever new ways to drive others crazy with their cars, providing a neverending supply of excuses to that part of the population addicted to road rage. Fill in your own three greatest pet peeves about the annoying behavior of other drivers, and I’ll get on to some forms of annoyingness that people seem all too complacent about.

The supermarket. It’s amazing how in even the widest of aisles three separate shoppers will conspire to angle and/or abandon their carts in just the right configuration so that you can’t get by, and then you have to choose between either politely calling their attention to the situation, sighing heavily, or taking it upon yourself to push the cart out of the way with just the right degree of agitation, enough to communicate subtly that the cart’s owner is pathologically inconsiderate, ethically impaired, and morally bankrupt. Don’t they realize that we were once hunters and gatherers, and that the supermarket holds a strong primeval connection to that not-so-ancient past? Getting in the way of people obtaining their food can lead to serious problems.

Television is generally annoying, but especially when somebody else has the remote, and double especially if that person happens to have Attention Deficit Disorder. But most annoying about TV is that we now have trillions of specialized channels, none of which recognize any responsibility to broadcast content related to the name of their channel. You turn to Planet Green thinking you’ll find something about the environment, but instead find Castle Ghosts of Scotland or Extreme Cruise Ships. What? The world’s environmental problems have gotten such thorough exposure already—and are so close to being solved—that the one channel supposedly dedicated to green stuff has to dredge the bottom of the cesspool for poorly lit crap about ghosts? It’s not just annoying, it’s about 50 or 60 miles across the border into criminal.

The Science Channel has Oddities, a show about a weird antique store and Mantracker, about a guy on a horse who tracks down people on foot. The History Channel has Ice Road Truckers and shows about the future for cryin’ out loud. Shouldn’t that be on the Future Channel? It’s like quarterbacks playing on baseball teams or going into a liquor store and finding baby formula mixed in with the booze. A search of TV listings on the word philosophy only turns up a line of skin care products that has a dedicated one-hour show on each of the too-many shopping channels, and it’s on several times every day. That’s the only philosophy you’re going to find on television. Talk about annoying.

Which brings up search results. In case you haven’t noticed, search engines sell search results. That’s why whenever you search on something nowadays you get results for something different, usually a company selling a product with that keyword in it instead of the information you wanted to find. When Google started out, the thing that enabled it to corner the market on searching was that it uncannily gave you the results you were looking for in a simple and straightforward manner. It quickly replaced the library reference section for finding out information, but now Ben Franklin’s greatest invention is under corporate sponsorship. It’s as if you’ve opened the dictionary to look up the word beer and found the definition: “beer is a product made by the Coors corporation in Colorado, click here to buy some.”

Everyday it seems that some company introduces a new product that is less designed to meet an actual human need and more intended as a way to annoy neighbors, family, friends, and/or strangers. Bug zapping lights—which actually attract bugs by the way—turn a perfectly pleasant summer evening into Pol Pot’s Cambodia. All kinds of products get produced in increasingly bright fluorescent colors that seem intent on blinding you, if the new high intensity headlights on European cars don’t get you first. Boom boxes seem to be engineered so that soon they will be able to cause earthquakes. Digital cameras will soon be included on the disposable plastic knives and forks in fast food restaurants (so that you can twitter photos of what you’re having for dinner). Certain body fragrances and deodorants seem destined to get their own segment and index on the Weather Channel. Pollen count, ozone level, eau de pheromone intensity.

Just because people are annoying doesn’t mean that you have to be annoyed by them. Buddhists and self-help gurus like Eckhart Tolle claim that you can simply choose not to engage such negative things in your environment. Let it Be, as the Beatles proclaimed.

But that’s a lot easier to do with your eyes than your ears. As Laurie Anderson pointed out many years ago, the greatest design flaw of the human body is that we don’t have ear flaps the way we have eye lids. It’s impossible to block out sounds the way we can simply look away from somebody taking a piss on the sidewalk. Give me the strength to change the things I can, accept the things I can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference say the 12 steppers. But frankly, the 12 steppers themselves annoy me. The same people who for years and years were pushing me to have another drink, now implying that I might have a drinking problem myself if I order a second glass of wine.

The problem with accepting that the world is getting more annoying—for the sake of your own peace of mind—is that then there won’t be any checks and balances. Any system that has no checks and balances is guaranteed to get worse, pumping more and more annoyances into the world until the whole thing is ready to explode with bad karma.

That’s what gives rise to political parties, the most annoying thing ever invented. The world is quite a complex place, but political parties would have you believe quite the opposite. They’ve reduced it to a few easy to remember slogans, and they’re out to convince you that their cycloptic take on things is actually true. I’ll skip the examples. You know exactly what I’m talking about.

As for me, I’ll stick to being annoyed by all the crap going on, and letting people know about it when I just can’t stand it any more. It might not make much difference, but if I remain silent about it, I know for sure that the world will just keep getting more and more annoying. And if that happens, I don’t know how I’ll manage.