Eastside Billiards Baby...

I used to play pool a lot. It was definitely a misuse of my youth but still it was always fun and provided some bucks when I needed them most. I was never involved in any pool hall brawls but I did witness a couple. Exciting stuff, pool cues and broken beer bottles and pool balls shoved into unsuspecting idiots' mouths. Good fun had by all. Recently I've felt the call of returning to the table to see if I had any skills left, so I set out on a walk that would take me to Eastside Billiards on 86th Street to meet a friend and go head to head in the game of pockets and felt. Is it billiards or pool you might ask? Well actually it's billiards the pool name was misnomer from the get go attached to the game of the gentry through association and from which billiard clubs and associations worldwide try to disassociate themselves from. It came about in ancient times when the billiard hall was a gathering place for betters to pool their money to bet on something, whether it was horses, games or cards. The rooms usually had billiards to play to pass the time between winning and losing your money, thus the name of pool for the ball and pocket game was born. It is from the name pool that the seamy reputation of the gentleman's and woman's sport was gotten. Eastside billiards isn't seamy but is a little tattered on the edges. It's a room of about sixteen tables and a modest bar that really gives you a good bang for the buck. The crowd is docile and well behaved. While I was there a grandfather was trying to teach two young cue carriers the ins and outs of the game. They were having a blast. My friend and I secured a corner table and began two hours of eight ball and two bottles of Red Stripe each. Some people say you play better when you drink but I would disagree. I got my ass beat bad. It was quite a humbling experience but it did not squelch my desire to play again. It felt good to be in a pool excuse me billiards room again and without the gagging smell of cigarettes stinking the place up it was downright pleasant. I left the place with my friend knowing that this would be a new weekly routine and I look forward to it...

Second Avenue Subway Blues...

It's here and near. Being a person that never thought the Second Avenue subway would be built I am in awe of the sight of it as I walk around the block and watch sparks fly, legions of hard hats climbing in and out of holes that are lined with mammoth timbers, an army of back hoes, tractors, Con Ed trucks and various other vehicles all inside chain linked fences from 95th St. to 90th St. much to the chagrin of 2nd Avenue merchants who complain of the noise, the loss of business and the vermin infestation not to mention the mud and the urban scape that looks like a bomb was dropped. And this isn't even the tunnel being dug this is just the infrastructure that will surround and join the tunnel that is being dug seventy feet below the surface by a drill they call "The Mole" that is grinding through the bedrock of Manhattan quiet as a mouse. There will not be any dynamite or loud hammering just the slow movement of a humongous drill that nobody will hear or feel. That's miraculous! But still the controlled chaos above ground will certainly cause more than its fair share of blues and congestion as it slowly moves down 2nd Avenue and reaches midtown. There will be a lot of grumbling for the next twelve years but nothing is going to stop this juggernaut that will be finished in 2020 which is almost one century after the original 2nd Avenue line was conjured. It will cost approximately 17 billion dollars but that is an estimate that will surely go higher. It will start at 125th Street and travel all the way downtown. The stops on the Upper East Side will include 96th Street, 86th Street, where the Food Emporium will be destroyed and replaced by a subway station, 72nd Street and 63rd Street. As I walk through the maze that the above ground construction is creating I linger to feel "The Mole" burrowing below but I don't feel anything, just the usual shake, rattle and roll of New York City. I walk back through the contained chaos and wonder about what is ahead for the line that almost never was and wonder what it will be like to have a gleaming new subway running under my front door. It will truly a be an amazing day when that first train rattles down the track...

Rainy Day People...

What a day, thunder and lightning and rain and more thunder and lightning and rain. I had the urge to walk in it. Coming from the Pacific Northwest, where the rain is thought to fall all the time, actually they get about half what New York City gets and having lived in London for six years where the rain is a cultural phenomenon but yet they still get less rain than New York (it's not the rain it's the gray), anyway the difference is in those two places the rain is usually a misty moist fog that permeates rather than falls while the rain in New York City falls in buckets and bounces off the sidewalks like ping-pong balls. A thunder shower in the city is like witnessing a torrential end of the world flood, but these types of rain usually happen in the spring and summer not in the middle of the winter. When I saw the first flash of lightning and heard the thunder and then saw the rain falling with thuds upon the street sounding like lemmings hitting the ground, it was a call to my rain loving heart. So I put on my trench coat and grabbed my duck umbrella and headed out. The rain must have caught most of the people outside by surprise because not a lot of them had umbrellas so they were ducking under awnings, covering themselves with their coats or as I saw one lady holding her shopping bag over her head like a Sherpa trekking in the Himalayas. Everyone seemed quite serious about it all but I could not help whistling and from where the tune came I don't know but it was an old ditty by America, the group, the title escapes me but it has the familiar lyrics, 'I've been to the desert on a horse with no name and it feels good to get out of the rain' or something like that. I found myself whistling and skipping over puddles the size of small clouds on Fifth Avenue. People looked at me as if I was a pink elephant. It was as dark as night and cars, buses and cabs with headlights on and horns blaring tried to feel their way through the monsoon. Small streams ran at breakneck speed to curb gutters. It was a baptismal paradise. It made me happy but even with my umbrella I was already soaked to the skin so at the Met I took a couple of pictures and headed home still whistling not able to get the ancient tune out of my head. At home I wrung out my clothes, dried my hair with a towel and stared out the window with a smile at the still falling precipitation...

Art Of Time...

It's the New Year. Hurray! The thing about new years are that they make me think about the passing of time. And speaking of time I recently started writing another blog, Across The Universe, for followorion.com. I figure walking Around The Block on the Upper East Side gives me great experience to wander, Across The Universe. As I was researching my new blog I came upon a very interesting theory that created a bit of a quandary, a little inspiration and a lot awe. It had to do with time. It seems that some scientists in Spain are bucking the notion that space is expanding, i.e. there was a big bang and the universe is expanding outward in space (space was here before space) and is traveling zillions of miles an hour away from us. To tell you the truth this premise has never been understood by my feeble mind in lieu of the parenthetical above. And getting back to the aforementioned new idea, these crazy scientists think that it is not that space is expanding it is that time is slowing down! I can't explain this to you but it makes perfect sense and although it might seem similar to calling the Earth flat, I know that it is a correct premise. Don't ask me why, because that is a crooked letter? So what does this have to do with taking a Walk Around The Block on the Upper East Side, well, the Met has a small intimate show entitled, The Art Of Time, and after viewing the mega Rembrandt show,(that I will write about next time) I decided to stop into this little showcase of European time pieces. Intimate as it might be the show is expansive and beautiful and may I say it, timeless(sorry). Really, it was amazing, all the time pieces exhibited were stunning, from the melange of wrist watches, pocket watches, standing clocks, coo-coo clocks, astronomical clocks and regular clock clocks that stood like sentries protecting time. It was quite extraordinary and the historic details are tasty. Anyway as I walked out of the Met the whole time slowing down came back to me and I thought about my reasons for believing time is indeed slowing down. It was simple, clocks stop they don't go on forever infinity and beyond and surely everything ends so time will have to, too and this will happen when finally time slows to a stop and then that will be the end. It wouldn't be such a bad way to go. No apocalypse, burning hell and brimstone just silent death, no more ticking...