2002-10-15 - 11:59 p.m.

In Brooklyn

I woke up in my golden bed, wrapped in sheets of silk...

Not really. I woke up my expensive but very ordinary hotel room at 7:25 a.m. I took a shower, got dressed, got my stuff together and got the hell out. In retrospect it would have been smarter to try to get some breakfast, but at that point I felt that Marriott had enough of my money. I'd find someplace to eat along the way.

By the way, the total bill, including taxes and parking came to $293. Like I said yesterday, for just $7 more you could rent an apartment in the Hamster Palace in Frown Town for a month! Holy Jumping Hammies!

Anyway, my plan of finding somewhere to eat on the way was flawed. Rush hour traffic was in full tilt, and no eateries were in evidence. Shit.

And what was the first thing I did? I got lost. Getting lost in New York Area rush hour traffic is not a trivial thing. Not only do you have to make split second decisions without getting killed, but you only realize that you are lost when you're sitting stuck in traffic and can't repair your situation.

Luckily for me that even though I was lost I was going in the right direction. I was able to get myself pointed toward Brooklyn driving with one hand on the steering wheel and the other clutching my road atlas. This wasn't as daredevil as it sounds - the traffic was moving very slowly. I now know why my brother Harry refers to the Long Island Expressway as "the world's longest parking lot."

Finally I made my way to the exit I was looking for, and finally made it to the streets of Brooklyn. I hadn't had breakfast, and since I didn't think there was anything near the library, I pulled into the parking lot of the first McDonalds I saw. I had a couple of egg and ham bagel sandwiches, throwing away the bagels. As usual, not a very satisfactory breakfast, but at least I was fed.

I've been to the Central Brooklyn Library before, so I sort-of knew how to get there: simply find Flatbush Avenue and head south. I found Flatbush Avenue pretty quickly, but I had a hard time getting on it going the right way. I kept finding myself on one-way streets going away from where I wanted to be.

At last though I found my goal.

The address of the Central Brooklyn is "Grand Army Plaza" which is Brooklynese for "huge fucking traffic circle."

The Brooklyn Public Library is an interesting building. It's designed to look like a book, resting on end, its spine facing out towards the Plaza. My opinion keeps changing about whether this is cool or kind of tacky. Since books and reading are one of the pillars of civilization I guess I'm leaning toward the former. The neighborhood the library's in is rather nice - right next door are the Brooklyn Museum and the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Nearby are Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Zoo, I think.

In the big city, parking is always a problem, but last time I was here I lucked out and found the nearby parking lot for the Brooklyn Museum, so I went there again. On a weekday morning the lot wasn't even a quarter full. I talked to the guard at the little booth, and he gave me a "special teachers' rate" since I was going to be there all day. It was then that I remembered that the booth is unmanned after 5PM and if you leave your car there past that time, you are essentially parking for free. Oopsie.

It was quarter to ten when I finally walked in the door of the library. The horrible traffic had really taken me a lot longer to plow through than I thought it would.

Most of the rest of my day there would be rather boring to talk about. I was single-mindedly going through newspapers from 1904, 1905 and 1902. Whenever I ran across a chess column I'd have the microfilm reader print it out. It cost 15 cents a copy, but I'd brought a big pile of change with me. I actually got through two full years of the paper, which is more than I thought I would.

I originally thought that food was going to be a problem, but there is a little caf� in the library lobby with sandwiches wrapped in Saran Wrap and little salads. The food was a little expensive, but you couldn't beat the convenience. After I broke for lunch at 2 p.m. I felt much, much better. The crappy breakfast at McDonalds really hadn't done much for me.

All of the microfilm readers were in a separate room, which was rather hot and stuffy due to the heat generated by the machines. I wished that I'd worn a short sleeve shirt. I was rather impressed about how good my concentration was on what I was doing. I was aware of what was going on around me, but I was able to work efficiently. For example, at one point some very noisy kids were using the Xerox machines that were also in the room, but it would have been more hassle to yell at them than just ignore them, which is what I did.

I'm kind of a solitary person, and this is certainly solitary work, but for some reason today a lot of people felt the urge to strike up a conversation with me while I was sitting at my machine. This is certainly unusual - generally I can be out wandering around in crowded places for whole days and nobody talks to me. Here it generally had to do with the fact that people seemed to be having trouble figuring out how the machines worked.

Late in the day a woman was sitting next to me, and we were chatting. She seemed to be doing something similar to me, except she was printing out the lottery numbers from the Daily News in 1977. Apparently she was looking for patterns in the numbers. Well, whatever floats your boat. Random events can SEEM to have patterns, but it's all in our heads. But who's to say that what she was doing was any less silly than what I was doing?

The reason I chose Tuesday for this little excursion was the library was open later than usual. Most days it closes at 5 p.m., but today it was open until 8. If I'm going to make such a long (and EXPENSIVE) trip, I might as well spend all the time there I can.

Ironically, after I left the library was when I experienced my most serious bit of disorientation. Thanks to the savage traffic in Grand Army Plaza I couldn't figure out how to get on Flatbush Avenue going north. I must have gone around the damn traffic circle four separate times until I discovered a side street which followed around the outside of it that took me where I wanted to go. Even after I was on Flatbush Avenue I was afraid that I might have been going the wrong way because nothing looked familiar in the gathering dark. Finally I saw the Manhattan Bridge in the distance and I knew I was going the right way.

I decided not to go back the way I came, instead going through Manhattan and north from there. I used to visit Manhattan constantly in the mid-1980s so was pretty familiar with it. Also, I was on a secret mission. Thanks to this woman I'd developed a serious jones for Krispy Kreme Donuts. I even went so far as to check out their website and find the nearest shop. Sadly, the closest Krispy Kreme to the Hamster Palace was in Manhattan, over three hours away by car. However, since I was there anyway...

Are donuts a low-carb food? Hell no! But my figuring is that any junk food that takes so much effort to obtain is permitted. Okay, I am deluded.

However, once I crossed into Manhattan I was doubting the wisdom of my choice. Mainly it occurred to me: "HOLY FUCK, I'M DRIVING IN MANHATTAN!!" Two thirds of the cars on the street were taxicabs, which generally means "You should not be driving here, suburban boy."

However I soon got in my city-driving zen mode, so everything was okay. Driving in the big city takes three things: patience, persistence and faith. Patience because unless you know exactly where you are going, you WILL get lost, persistence is a given, and faith is necessary to get yourself found again. Basically my mantra is that the streets of Manhattan are just a numbered grid, and once you find the streets with the numbers, you know where you are! Low number Avenues are east, high numbers are west, and the street numbers get higher as you head north. Oh so simple!

The trouble is the Manhattan Bridge has plopped me down in the middle of a bunch of streets with actual names, so I was all in a fog. I tooled around Greenwich village for a while, then emerged into NoHo before I finally found some streets with numbers. Of course all of this was in crawling traffic.

I basically decided to hit the Krispy Kreme that was on 23rd street between 7th and 8th Avenue, one of the half-dozen shops in Manhattan. After getting to 23rd Street I made two complete circuits of the block and didn't find it. Maybe I wrote it down wrong? So I then relied on the Zen of Finding Things. The best way to find things, I've found, is to give up looking for them. I then decided that I was going to say to hell with it, and just take 23rd street to the West Side Highway and go home. However, as I was sitting at a light I looked over to my right and sure enough there was the Krispy Kreme, still open after 9 p.m.

As anyone who drives in Manhattan knows finding something is just half the battle - you have to then find a legal place to park your car. To my utter astonishment about a half a block later I found an open spot with a parking meter on it. My thought on finding this was "God must really want me to have those donuts!"

So I got me some Krispy Kreme donuts. They were good, but I'm not sure that I was sufficiently appreciative because I wolfed them down because I was so very hungry. After I was done I looked down and my shirt was liberally dusted with powdered sugar. How absolutely glorious! I also think my appreciation of them was definitely fueled by the fact that I'd eaten no pastries of any sort for over a month. Wheee!

There was a Boston Market right next door, and I got a real dinner there. Then I hopped in my car, and about 15 minutes later I was exiting Manhattan via the George Washington Bridge.

You know, if the mishaps had ended right there I would have thought the day was a real success, in spite of the Very Expensive Hotel Room. Unfortunately on the way home I did something very, very stupid. To make a long story short, I got caught speeding. According to the cop I was going 88 (!!) in a 65 zone, which was very naughty. I knew I was going too fast, but I didn't think I was going THAT fast.

You know, the temptation is to deliver a grumbling rant about how there must be no murders or rapes because the police have nothing else better to do than monitor nearly deserted roads at midnight on a weekday night. However, speeding was just such a stupid thing for me to do, and really unnecessary. So what if I got home a half hour later? I really wasn't THAT tired. Once again, I'm showing some more really bad judgment. When will I learn?

However, the fact is, the Thruway is not MY road. I don't own it. I can't use it for my own personal speedway. I'm looking at it this way: while the speeding ticket is certainly going to be expensive (ouch!) and the subsequent hike in my car insurance is going to be even MORE expensive (Ouch! Ouch!) it's still cheaper than killing myself by trying to speed around like a NASCAR driver. Maybe I can use this as a prod to become a safer driver. But MAN, I really don't need the extra expense now.

This entry is very long, so I'm going to close out now. There is a little more to tell, but that's for tomorrow.