Greenwich Village, NYC:
Greenwich Village Gazette Humorist
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We don’t live in the United States, we live...
On an Island off the Coast

ime and space are different here in Manhattanland. Maybe the population density is so extreme that we've got some kind of black hole effect going on here.

We live on an island about the size of the Midwestern community I grew up in. That city of the flatlands had a population of around 100,000. Here, we measure in the millions. The average human density of a single city block is in the thousands. You could bike the ten mile length of my hometown from end to end in an hour. Anybody want to try biking the length of Manhattan? It could be a lifetime's profession. Just going cross-town is a feat akin to mounting Everest without an oxygen mask.

In my flatland hometown, you expect pizza delivery in under 30 minutes. Here, you can get food from any cuisine of the world in about 15 minutes. Things move fast here, right? So try getting counter help. Ha! I tell you--ha!

The Manhattan sense of time is like the joke about the impatient guy and the microwave. He said, "Come ON! I don't have all SECOND!"

Yet everywhere we go, we wait in lines longer than at toilet paper sales in Russia during the Breshnev-era. And, inevitably, people arrive to any party, opening, or dinner an hour late. You can set your clock by it.

People talk a mile a minute and walk a clip that would embarrass the mechanical rabbit at a dog race. They chat on the phone while typing on the computer and...wait, that's my second line. Can you hold? All this is at home! Life at the office is even more hectic.

Actually trying to get anything DONE is another story. The bureaucracy has grown as convoluted as that of an old world European government. Dealing with the Post Office is like talking to a French official. After you get past the language barrier, it's still impossible to understand what the rules and regulations mean.

Oh, and try to get a plumber, carpenter, or electrician to come to do a job. And once they come, try even harder to get them to FINISH the job. It's life underwater, where all movement is slow and sensuous. It's a cheap science fiction movie, where the scenes are shot in slow motion to make it look like zero gravity movement. It's like the classical fable of Sisyphus, no wait, the eighth labor of Hercules--no, I got it! It's like the paradox of Xeno's race, where no distance can be crossed because you must first cross half that distance and then half the remaining distance, then half the remaining distance, and so on until you're splitting molecules in half, then atoms, then quantum particles...the paradox wasn't solved until the '50 when the mathematics of relative infinities were developed. Unfortunately, my contractor has a weak grasp of quantum physics. To hear him talk, replastering a wall is far more complicated, in any event.

But then again, go to 14th street if you're in a buying mood. They swarm over you and, in an imaginative version of English, offer you every assistance possible, eager to get you to spend ten dollars on an item that would cost 50 or 100 anywhere else in the city. And once your money is out, they are eager to grab it and complete the sale. In a larger, posher shops, they seem to have no interest in making money. Getting you your change seems to be an excruciatingly exhausting proposition.

The restaurants in this burg are as good with time as the hustlers on 14th street. In France, getting the first course can take three hours. Here, a good--and I mean REALLY good--French meal is over and done with as fast as you like. They like to clear those tables! They'll snatch your plate out from under you as you're lifting your final forkful to your mouth. Those waiters must subsist on a diet of thick rich sauces laced with Benzedrine.

I'd tell you more, but I have things to do. Gotta go now. I'm BUSY.

Link Yaco has written comic books for several publishers.  He is currently working on a couple comics-related paperbacks.  He has been a copywriter, technical writer, newspaper journalist, and magazine entertainment writer.  He has a Masters' degree in Telecommunications and was a technical manager at MIT for five years.  Link lives in West Greenwich Village with his wife, Susannah, a Senior Vice President at an independent film company.  Check out his web page here

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