Is it perverse that I saw this clip and the first thing my body felt was a longing for NYC? I was in the city for almost a decade but have since been back in Florida for over a year. I’ve lived in Texas and Panama (the country, not the redneck riviera in Florida). I’ve traveled all over the world and I can tell you that I’ve encountered crazy people everywhere I’ve been, but there’s no crazy quite like NYC crazy.
It’s a special breed of insanity. One that can reveal itself to you on your first day in the city when you’re moving into a new apartment and an elderly woman tries to steal your artwork from the moving truck by claiming that she ‘thought it was trash’. Or it can spring its pungent stench upon you the first time you step into a vacant subway car during peak hours only to find a homeless man who has pissed and shit himself before vomiting all over the subway car. Or, and this one didn’t happen to me like the others, but this happened to a friend who I was with at the time…a homeless man can actually cough phlegm into your mouth as you’re walking down the street and he approaches you to ask for cash (yes, that actually happened and she probably never recovered from mental scars).
Anyways, I love Florida. It’s where I was born and raised, and the proximity to world class fishing outweighs my love of being able to order Indian food at 4:30 am whenever I want. But, when I saw this woman go postal on a group of bystanders filming her after she’d crashed through the front windows of a gas station I felt a longing for that level of NYC batshit crazy that always keeps you on your toes. Without the 24/7/365 imminent danger of getting puked on by a drunk millennial or pissed on by a homeless man, you begin to become careless in your surroundings and start to see the good in people instead of assuming everyone’s a total shithead (but also recognizing their right to be a shithead).
I miss this lady and her craziness, even though I’ve never met her. And anyone out there thinking about moving to New York should take a moment to realize that living in NYC does this shit to your brain.