Bryan Joiner

To the guy who honked at me when I was in the crosswalk yesterday… really? I was walking across 29th street on my way to the park for lunch when I heard you honk. Since I’ve been on cold medicine all week, it didn’t immediately register that you were honking at me — there were several people in the intersection, and none of them were cars. When I got to the other side of the street, I looked back at you in attempt to make a snap judgment as to What Your Problem Was when I saw it: the address on your side door. “Etc., etc., Scranton, PA.”

So here’s the little backstory I invented while mouthing the words “Fuck You” in your direction: you don’t come to the big city that often, and you hear everyone else honking, so you figure, “Hey, let’s give this a shot.” Only here’s what you don’t realize: you don’t honk at pedestrians in the crosswalk. It is your job to sit there and Keep Absoluely Quiet, unless I’m on some sort of conveyance, in which case you have Mayor Michael Fucking Bloomberg’s permission to play that funky music, white boy (approved conveyances include a bicycle, segway or your mother). You probably learned your lesson from my stares and those of the other crossers around me, so hopefully you’re good to go from now on. Unless you’re just pissed off that NBC emasculated your hometown. Can’t help you there.

To my cold… really? Four days and counting? I could barely pull myself out of bed this morning and I’ve done nothing but mend to you since Sunday evening. On Monday I tried to deny your existence, because I had unimpeachably better plans that were a long time coming, but in the end I had to cancel them. Fine. I received a slight life Monday evening and Tuesday morning, leading me to believe you were a 24-hour bug… but no. The rest of Tuesday and all of Wednesday were completely hellish. All this for what, playing a little softball in the rain on Sunday? Please. That’s hardly fair (especially considering we won the game). Then I biked home, which surely exacerbated the problem. Would you rather that I had driven, destroying your Earthly paradise, God? (Or whomever?) I didn’t think so. Let’s cut me a little break here and end this right now.

To The Wire… really? You’re really this good? I started season three last night, and you continue to amaze me. I had watched seasons one and two at breakneck pace, which was a mistake. The Wire, it has often been said, is like a novel, and I burnt myself out on it too quickly. Now I’m ready to handle more adventures of McNulty, Stringer and the gang. It’s really the second-best TV show I’ve ever seen, and the least repeatable (The Sopranos is the best, but it’s more easily digestable). I took an hour break between the episodes last night, and that made all the difference. To top it off David Simon is a (far-flung) family friend, to the point where my beloved mother told me recently, “So-and-so Simon is doing this, so-and-so Simon is doing that, David Simon is still doing The Wire…” which was a hoot. I’m on it. Gotta love mom, though. Hi mom.