The Blast Most Delicious

I have written about my friend Ben in the past. I'm always wary of writing about Ben here, because I'm not sure if I can convey his special brand of thinking on the blog. But this story isn't really about Ben and his bizarre antics. It's about me putting Ben on blast, a most supreme and incredible blast, about three weeks ago.

It all began four Saturdays ago, when Ben and I agreed to hang out the following Sunday. He said he would call me as soon as he woke up, and he would get on the train to my house so we could do the usual thing, probably play video games and watch movies. I have known Ben for a long time now, and I understand that a promise from Ben to call or come through is about as good as a Canadian quarter at the peep show. So I made plans with another friend of mine to come by and essentially do the same thing: play video games and watch movies. I figured that on the outside chance that Ben called Sunday morning, we could all hang out together.

Unsurprisingly, Ben did not call Sunday morning. I wasn't really upset, but I decided I would give Ben a call around noon to lay a guilt trip on him (and hopefully get some more amazing quotables). He didn't pick up, but moments later I get a text message from Jimmy's roommate that tells me they are at the beach together, and Ben is telling his girlfriend that he is on the way to my house, while seagulls squawk and people cavort in the background. Coincidentally, Ben is lying to his girlfriend about going to my house while I am calling him to be a pain in the ass! I was amused by this, but forgot it as my friend came by and we spent the day as planned.

On Monday, I decided that the next time I saw Ben, I would put him on blast.

It was not a decision made out of anger or for revenge, but because I saw an opportunity to put Ben on a supremely delicious blast that could possibly go down in history as one of the greatest blasts to have ever been put on a person. I told people about my impending ether, and made it clear that I would put Ben on blast whether his girlfriend was nearby or not. Obviously, though, if I put Ben on blast in front of his girlfriend, it would be twice as succulent.

I rehearsed my intentions over the next few days. I knew I would bring it up casually, and then be sure to add that his word is not bond; that despite all of his claims that he is "a man," he is not being a man at all if he can't follow through on the simplest promise. It would be a great blast because this is something that is discussed among everyone that knows Ben: even though he claims to have all the virtues of manhood, he has no ability to meet things head-on. I decided I would not use the fact that he lied to his girlfriend while I called him on the day we planned to get together, unless it was absolutely necessary.

That Friday, Ben's roommate had a party at his house, and I was in attendance. Ben and his girlfriend were at the movies, and would return home around 10:30 PM. Everyone at the party knew of the impending blast. I bode my time, had a few drinks, and waited for the inevitable hour. Ben and his girlfriend came home on schedule, and we exchanged pleasantries for a little while. After about twenty minutes, I opened fire.

"Ben, what happened last Sunday? You were supposed to call me"

All of the color instantly drained from Ben's face, and he began to stammer. In a voice barely audible by trained dogs, he started to say something like "The sun...the sun was calling, Reggie." Simultaneously, his girlfriend turned in her seat and gave Ben a stare that would have rivaled Samuel Jackson's. "You didn't go to Reggie's?" she stated, rather than queried. I knew that I would not have to mention that he lied to his girl while denying my call that Sunday.

I continued: "You said you would call me, but you never did. I even called you at noon and you didn't pick up. That's not being a man. Your word is not bond." Ben was still trying to compose himself, mumbling an apology and gamely putting his hand on my shoulder in a show of friendship. Ben's girlfriend then gets up from her seat, walks to Ben's bedroom, and stands in the open doorway glaring at Ben. "I think you are needed elsewhere," I said, and Ben hung his head and walked solemnly into his bedroom, the door slamming shut behind him. He was bawled out for five hours, effectively ending his evening.

In all, my blast took less than two minutes, far less time than I had planned. But the effect was more severe than I had hoped. Ben's girlfriend was honed into his potential for lying, and he was caught in the crossfire. Later, Ben told his roommate that I had done him a favor, because his girl suggested that they see less of each other for a while. But I know that putting Ben in that spot, I turned his labyrinth of lying into a prison. A prison which unfortunately lasted only five hours of conversational torture.

On Gentrification

Every week in the City section of the New York Times, there's an article about some neighborhood, usually in Brooklyn, clamoring to have itself listed a landmark district or to be de-zoned to limit the kind (and height) of new buildings in the area. It seems that these people want to preserve the unique qualities of their respective neighborhoods: the grimy coffee shops, the bullet-proof bodegas, the run-down churches that have become repositories for homeless drug addicts. Many of these neighborhood activists are quoted as remembering the good old days of their neighborhoods, reaching as far back as 1992, when said person moved to New York from Minnesota to be some stupid fucking art director at a shitty trend-laden magazine.

And you know, it's really starting to piss me off. People bandy about the word "gentrification" like it's some imposed cancer on New York society, a softening of the hard-nosed attitude that makes our fair city the butt of lame comedians around the world. Where ya from? New York? Oh, I'd better hold on to my wallet! Polite chuckling. What meaning can a joke like this hold in a post-Giuliani New York where there is a Disney Store in Times Square? How will these poor comedians make a living? I certainly don't want to see mental midgets of their caliber working retail and trying to figure out the cash register.

And the motherfuckers on these Landmark Preservation Society bullshit committees are usually the very kind of upwardly-mobile douchebags that cause gentrification in the first place! Do you think that just because you moved into the neighborhood when it still smelled like rat piss, you can claim some ownership over it? Do you really have the audacity to force a neighborhood ravaged by the 1977 blackout riots to maintain its "gritty character"? Go shove that gritty character up your assholes! New York doesn't give a fuck about your nostalgic revisionist bullshit. The city will jam a high-rise condominium down your throat and make you love it. You want grit? Move to Detroit.

I wonder what "good old days" these assclowns are really harkening to. Could it be the 1970's, when the city was bankrupt and the subway was an unreliable danger zone? Or perhaps they want to bring it back to the 1940's, when Civil Defense drills kept the city in darkness for many nights and you could get picked up and shipped off to war for vagrancy. I know, they want to bring back the gaslight era, when the streets reeked of horse manure and you wallowed in your own sweat-soaked suit by the light of a candle. The reality is that New York has been gentrifying since Peter Minuit copped the island of Manhattan from the Lanape Indians in 1625. He dumped a bunch of disparate crackers at the southernmost tip of Manhattan--a word which many believe comes from a Lenape word meaning "Wooded Hills"--and they immediately began re-fitting the land for their purposes. I don't suppose you've seen many woods or hills around Manhattan lately, huh?

I grew up in a crummy little neighborhood in the ass end of Queens called Flushing. It was by no means a crime-ridden neighborhood, but it was kind of run-down when I was younger. There was a bar or two every block. Most residents were blue-collar workers or people collecting social security or disability payments. The streets were filthy, and it was not uncommon to see drunk adults stumbling around in broad daylight (I know, because we taunted them from the safety of our bicycles).
Around 1988, the neighborhood started to make some serious changes. A tremendous influx of Koreans came to the neighborhood and began to reshape it to their purposes. Flushing became, and remains, an outpost for Korean business in America, and there is a seemingly endless number of Korean stores and restaurants in the neighborhood, with more opening every day. It's no surprise that the dickbags from the neighborhood resented the arrival of these "chinks" and their changes. But my question is, where were you? What were you doing while the pharmacy got security bars on its windows and the neighborhood alcoholics turned to crackheads? You were sitting in this dank, depressing bar, spending your paycheck on poison to kill your brain and your liver. And now that the neighborhood has shaped up, now that the severely cracked streets have been repaved, now that every storefront is occupied with a successful business, now that Main Street is a bustling center of business instead of a haven for batshit senior citizens that piss themselves and head shops, now you want to claim ownership of the neighborhood. Well buddy, if you want to live among the rubbish, then move to the garbage dump.

The one constant I've observed after living in New York for (almost) thirty-two years is change. It is inevitable. Leave a neighborhood and return after five years, and it will probably be totally different. Affluent neighborhoods become run-down crime zones. Derelict districts become high-priced loft space. And there's not a goddamned thing you could or should do about it. If you wanted creature comforts, then you should have stayed back in Minnesota.