It's smoke or snooze over here

Last night I decided to test my mindfulness-based stress reduction techniques by walking home via 43rd Avenue after work. It was a worthy test, for I discovered that mindfulness-based stress reduction techniques do not work at all. (That's one self-help book I can recycle.) What I encountered on the Avenue made me furious. Well, let me back up to Woodside Avenue, which I passed first on my walk from the train. The lovely Community Garden that some kind neighbor planted on Woodside and 72nd was strewn with trash. (You know the phrase "This is why we can't have anything nice"-?!?) I picked up the trash as best I could. And, sigh, then I proceeded up the block to 43rd. Of course, the wacky weeders were already out. This was about 7pm. It was still daylight, and there were still plenty of people walking home from the train. But there were two large groups of weeders, just standing right out on the sidewalk puffing away: one group close to 72nd Street, the other group right in the middle of 43rd (on the overpass).


This is what it looked like when I did my lie-down-in(?) protest last night. But the lady
 in the photo is a generic internet person; I myself am much wider.
Say, I guess I could have lain down on that dumped mattress-
that would have made me look even crazier!

 

What made me so mad last night, and continues to irk me all the time, is that NOBODY CARED. There were so many people walking by, through clouds of pot smoke- all kinds of people: young, old, families with little kids in hand or babies in strollers... and no one cared at all. Well, I care. I sometimes feel like I am the only person who DOES care.

Since I'm a little bit crazy, what I did was lie down on the sidewalk about 10 feet from the overpass group. I wanted to see if any of these nonchalant pedestrians (or drivers, for that matter) would stop when they saw a body on the sidewalk. Obviously large groups of people doing drugs right on the sidewalk do not bother them at all. Well, it turns out that neither does the sight of a person lying on the sidewalk, eyes closed. They just walked around me. Some must have been creeped out at least a little though because they walked in the street. Anyway, my great test of whether or not anyone gives a fork about anything yielded the expected results: no, no one (who was walking around here last night at least) cares about anything, or anyone. That is why people can do drugs in broad daylight on the sidewalk. And why people can graffiti whole panels of overpass (this happened a few months ago on Woodside Avenue, which is MUCH more heavily trafficked; many people saw the graffiti in progress, but no one called the cops).

The subject of graffiti reminds me that there actually are people in the next 'hood over- Woodside proper- who care about such things, namely, Fire Alarm Guy and the Woodside Neighborhood Association. They have helped clean up our neighborhood- including its graffiti- many times. The problem is, until people who actually live here start to take some interest in what goes on, we are pretty much screwed, and it will remain a garbage dump/drug hangout.

Please people, if you see something (like those a-hole kidults who smoke pot every single night here), call the cops on them. And if you see a body lying on the sidewalk, at least stop and see if it has a pulse! (and ideally ask if it's okay, and if no response, call 911). Sigh.