it's free, no kidding, really

They told me the Staten Island Ferry is free. It said so right on their website. Can you believe it? Back in the Eighties, when I lived in Morris County, New Jersey, the Ferry was my go-to tourist thing when I had in-laws come down from the farm Upstate, especially if a foreign-exchange student was in the mix. Come on down! In those days, you could put your car on it and go across to Manhattan. It was a nominal fee (a few bucks?). It was my preferred thing because it was inexpensive, relaxing, scenic, almost a well kept secret. You breezed by the Statue of Liberty, had great views of the Twin Towers and their environs, the Brooklyn Bridge, Brooklyn, New Jersey, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the harbor or bay or whatever it is, tugboats, freighters, cruise ships, even a flotilla of sailboats here and there.

So I told KP, "Let's one of these days take a spin down to New York, hop on the Staten Island Ferry, touch Manhattan, sail back to S.I., and drive back. Maybe five hours each way. We could do it."

"Sure. Let's."

It became a hybrid of running joke and dare.

Then I got a new car.

We did it.

In the bronze sunset of an August Wednesday afternoon.

That's the Ferry part.

It was worth it. It will always be part of our DNA and memory databases, individual and dual, if there is such a thing.

It's free.

That knocks me out, as Holden Caulfield would say.

Why free? Someone suggested it's because no one wants to go to Staten Island har har. That would only be half of a round-trip reasoning anyway. Plus, as we rode the Ferry from Manhattan during rush hour there was a healthy crowd of commuters, and tourists like ourselves, headed to Staten Island -- more than the other way around in the evening rush hour.

Thank you, Gotham.

Glad to take advantage of your gracious hospitality. Pleased to mingle with myriad visitors with myriad accents and stories of their own.

I mean, how many cities can claim such gratis generosity? San Francisco's cable cars aren't free. Is the Coliseum in Rome? The Tower in London? The Sistine Chapel? Sure, examples of free stuff for visitors abound. (Tell me some.) Parliaments of many nations, the White House, the National Zoo (not free in the sense of paid for by our taxes if you pay American taxes).

But how many freebies are there that match the scale and convenience of the Staten Island Ferry?

You malcontents who constantly bitch that "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch" and bemoan paying any taxes whatsoever (give it all to me, baby! fuckem all!), take a ride on the Staten Island Ferry. Open your eyes, breathe the windswept air, hear the seagulls and the boat's foghorn, absorb the auditory mosaic of many tongues from near and far.

Enjoy the ride, if you can.

Sail on home. 

Or anywhere.

financial fragility

According to research cited in a WSJ blog, nearly half of us (Americans) are "financially fragile." Curious that eggheads have to undertake a study to verify this. The respondents were asked if they'd have trouble ponying up $2,000 in 30 days -- the amount representing a major car repair, such as transmission replacement, or some other unforeseen emergency: medical, legal, home repair, or addiction. (OK, so I threw in the last one; it's not crazily unrealistic, though, is it?)

A few qualifiers:

-- 2009 data were used
-- US respondents were not nearly as financially fragile as those in other countries

The results certainly don't shock me. While I have only consulted the article, and not the study itself, I'd have to muse:

-- Can I borrow to come up with the $2,000?
-- Can I tap into 401k or other money set aside for retirement?
-- Must I resort to legal means?
-- Does reckless gambling count as an option?
-- 30 days? ARE YOU KIDDING? Like the transmission guy or the dentist or the lawyer or the mortgage company is going to just spot you 30 days, just like that? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. (I'm making sure I can come up with $60 cold cash for lawnmower repair tomorrow.)

Folks, it's 2011. Let's hope the "financial fragility" ratios have improved, rapturously.

Talk about AlbatrossDreams.

Look, Ma, No Hands! I'm Freecycling!

I've blogged about freegans, so why not freecycling?

I'm free to say, "Sounds okay to me."

Isn't this exchange of words and thoughts and feelings we call blogging a bit of spiritual freecycling?

But is anything free?

What is the cost of letting go?

What is the price of too many feckless fruitless fecking questions?


Alliteration Alert:

Polymorphous-perverse polycyclic pedantry pulsates pompously, puerilely.

Cyclic consumerism cascades communities corrosively.

Farewell to July, and my record number of posturing, postulant, petty, petulant, piscine, postliterate postiche of Pawline posts.

(Speaking of verbal blow-ups, wasn't it strange that filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni died right after filmmaker Ingmar Bergman? Maybe not strange at all. Pretty much all I remember about the former is that FirstSpouse fell asleep in the theater watching "The Passenger." Jack Nicholson either talked too slowly, or not at all. So, of course, I declared I liked the movie, it was high art, how could you?! etc. But no one gets blown up in "Blow-up," right?)

Freegonomics: Food for Thought -- and Word Blenders

As you know, I like wordplay. The title of my blog declares it. (Of course, laughorist is a blend of laugh + aphorist.) So, when I read an online piece today about some folks in the San Francisco area who succeeded in complying with their vow not to shop for a year (with some exceptions), I was all set to declare myself as the inventor of the blended neologism "freegonomics."

Read on.

The news story made reference to so-called freegans, people who advocate minimal consumption -- with some going so far as to eat out of Dumpsters. (Please note: the former newspaper copy editor in me warns you that Dumpster is a brand name and should be capitalized when you read it in print or online.) The word freegan itself, of course, is a linguistic blend of free + vegan. (Turns out that some freegans are meagans, because they allow themselves to eat meat.)

Well, I cannot claim to have coined the term freegonomics (the link here to the word is actually a thought-provoking essay by columnist Lucy Siegle in The Observer back in February 2006). A simple search of "freegonomics" indicates that several others already beat me to it, by months if not years.

Even if I did not coin the term, I feel the concept raises issues worth considering. When I was in college, during the Vietnam War, I remember a philosophy professor, John McNeill, challenging our class at LeMoyne College with respect to those who protested the war. He said something like this:

"A Franciscan movement could end this war in 90 days. But you can't do it. If everyone from, say, the ages of 15 to 30 disciplined themselves to the point of buying only necessary goods, you would be able to get anything you want from the government in no time. The economic effect would be huge, and you would be able to stop the war. But you don't have that ability to sacrifice."

Something like that. And I suspected then, and now, he was right.

There's little doubt that consumption (is "overconsumption" a redundancy about redundancies?) in capitalist (well, in all societies) involves abuse, destruction, waste, and greed.

But couldn't the same be said ever since Adam and Eve (easy on those apples, kids)?

I don't disagree that we (we in the U.S. and the so-called developed nations, as well as we who pollute the air and foul the rivers of a booming China) are ravaging the planet. But on a macroeconomic level, if "we" all were to cut back even to a sensible minimum of consumption (a sensible minimum, however you define it), does that impoverish thousands, if not millions, of suddenly jobless people?

I am neither a microeconomist nor a macroeconomist. I tend to be quite frugal (some would say cheapskate). I am not an extravagant buyer. When clothes are given to me as gifts, I feel sheepish (well, that's true for anything made of wool - HAHAHAHA).

I don't know what to conclude about any of this.

Just some food for thought.

And, speaking of word blenders, as opposed to food blenders, even Wikipedia (the source of many definitions above) is a blend of wiki (Hawaiian for fast) + encyclopedia.

You can look it up.

Laugh. Or....

Else.