Dear People with Pets,

Just admit that this is how you see your dog.

Sincerely,

The Guy With the Telepathic Camera App

There’s an awful lot of electricity being used inside of this alleged Amish Market; maybe the entire store is being run by kids on rumspringa. That does seem unusually enterprising for a bunch of 16-year-olds on vacation in Never Never Land, however.

I saw this girl on the train. Hey, girl.

At 8:30 in the morning, she was reading this book. Hey, giiiiiiirl!

Now that I’ve looked up Mandingo Pt. II, Amazon keeps trying to sell me this book. I hope Facebook doesn’t hear about this.

It isn’t really that I even feel attached to the nicotine anymore. I started smoking early on in college, standing around at parties after the beer ran out and needing something to do with my hands. I wanted to look cool for this girl I liked and something about a menthol Camel seemed to do the trick. While it wasn’t much longer before I gave up on the idea of girls, the cigarettes have managed to stick with me years later.

Frat party or not, I still have a need to look detached and derelict if not outright dangerous. Days may go by without cravings, but as soon as I need some stage business while I wait for someone outside of a bar, I reach for my cigarette case (another affectation to try to appear interesting) and light up a five-minute cure for social anxiety.

When you get up in the morning, putting certain things in your pockets—keys, wallet, phone, Xanax—eventually gets burned into your muscle memory. Because I’m not a consistent smoker, a lighter hasn’t quite made its way onto the list of things that will end up in my jeans after I’ve sleepwalked through my morning routine. Inevitably, this means I’ll have to ask a stranger for a light while I’m  filling empty time loitering on the street.

As conversations with strangers go, this one should be fairly simple. Smokers aren’t uncommon, but they still conduct themselves as members of a kind of implied social club—kind of like Jews or Wes Anderson fans. They don’t usually consider the request to be an imposition since they’ve surely been in a similar position before and will be again. Nevertheless, despite a smoker’s willingness to accommodate his tovarishch, the exchange typically reveals the fundamental lack of trust that exists between New Yorkers.

After the brief “where did I put my lighter” dance, your new friend will reach out, cup his hand and attempt to light your cigarette for you. The frustration on his face is evident as he futilely tries to start a fire in a wind tunnel—it’s difficult to light your cigarette on a breezy fall afternoon in the city and virtually impossible to light someone else’s. Still, he isn’t trying to be neighborly, rather that he’s so concerned that you’ll abscond with his precious blue Bic that he’d rather turn a five second transaction into a Sisyphean trial.

Dude, really… what the fuck do you think I’m going to do?

Is that my game in your mind? I walk around with a pack of Marlboro Ultra Lights preying on naïve simpletons who didn’t get to the “Protecting Your Valuables” chapter in The New Yorker’s Handbook before they hit a bump and fell off the turnip trick? Did Nancy Grace expose a community of grifters canvassing the city collecting half-beat Texaco lighters before convening in a caravan parked on the outskirts of town? Even if she did, that woman is insane and so are you for listening to her.

There’s no such thing as The Zippo Gang so just let me hold the lighter, asshole. This is an insult to us both.

You can’t tell due to the low-resolution of my Apple SpacePhone’s camera, but his “gold” chain has this logo emblazoned on the dog tag (in full Technicolor). Combined with the hat (which looks like something that black Bart Simpson would wear on one of those bootleg shirts from the 90s), This Guy must really want us to know that he likes reggae but is fine being single for the rest of his life. A little on-the-nose, man… a little on-the-nose. If nothing else, the small “they only give these out at head shops” black plastic bag is enough of a signal alone.

This is nowhere near the meanest thing I’ve said about a stranger today.

No.

Sincerely,

I’ll just throw it away

I had Captain America and Kimbo Slice ready for him but I just kinda looked at him like “dude, really?” and he got off the train without incident. This other guy looked at me and shrugged. I did the same.

The end.

Three teenagers (ASSHOLE, DICKHEAD and DOUCHER) sit in the back corner of a car on the uptown A at like, 2:30 in the morning when everyone is tired as hell and just wants to relax a little bit. They are all crowded into one corner so none of their mouths is more than 18 inches from another. Still, they insist on shouting at each other at a level that you’d think even they would find uncomfortable.

THE LOOOK ON EVERYONE ELSE’S FACE indicates that every other passenger is independently imaging different ways in which these boys might die horrible deaths before the next stop.

ASSHOLE

Yo!

[shouts some unintelligible Spanglish]  

Right?

DICKHEAD

Yo, she was like, she was like…

[shouts some unintelligible Spanglish]

and I told the bitch…

[shouts some unintelligible Spanglish]

Yo, listen! Listen! Fuck that!

DOUCHER

Yo!

[stands and laughs, then shouts some unintelligible Spanglish]

THE LOOOK ON EVERYONE ELSE’S FACE

Shut the fuck up!

They do not.

“Dear cancer,

This is your stop. Get out!

Love,

Me”

Who loves their cancer?