Hope for NYC

The Avalon Bowery Madonna Bleeds Black
Small signs of hope amid the gloom...

An Altercation Outside Starbucks

At Astor Place a few weeks ago, a woman screams at a man "Kiss my dog's ass, bitch!"

The city's luxury facade -- like the "souls" of its luxury inhabitants -- is brittle as glass, and the first crack could rapidly spread to bring the whole thing down.  If a butterfly in the Himalayas can affect the weather in Las Vegas, then it's logical to assume a cantankerous street person can cause a revolution in NYC!

Union Square Park's Latent Crackheads

A police command post RV still sits outside Union Square park, because the presence of the park's street people -- who have been there all along, forever -- is suddenly a scandal!  They may be smoking in the park [The Daily Show], and how can anyone concentrate on their cellphone call, or get any work done on their laptop, with lowlifes blowing smoke in their face from 20 feet away?!

The developers told us it was either them or the crackheads who'd have their way with us, and frankly, we'd have been better off with the crackheads.

I'll bet that if you bought the park denizens some crack -- or better yet, some Loco-Motion Bath Salts from the Babies 'r Us across the street, to see if "You could fry an egg on their forehead," [NYT] -- within a few hours you'd have a "flash mob" of rampaging zombies, breaking into luxury condos to steal the copper pipes to buy more bath salts!  And soon you'd have a full-blown insurrection, because when the fabric of a city is plastic, a stray spark can melt the whole thing down, like shoving fully clothed Barbie & Ken dolls into a toaster and cooking them like Pop Tarts!

The Avalon Bowery Madonna Bleeds Black

(Up top) A simple alteration brings some truth to the Avalon Bowery window ads on 2nd Ave. at 1st St. -- across from the doomed Mars Bar [NYT] -- with a target-market model bleeding emptiness from her eyeballs.

NYC is now a magnet for empty souls; they come here from around the country and around the world to share their emptiness and drown the city in it.  Maybe if they see we have a surplus of emptiness they'll take theirs somewhere else?  We can only hope...

I know it seems hard, but all you need to do to rebuild hope is to "flip the switch," quit thinking so small, and see our inevitable doom for what it really is: An Opportunity!