Critical Ass

It's official. Here in NY, we've passed the point of no return. Enough consecutive hot, disgustingly humid days combined with the standard amount of garbage that sits waiting on the sidewalks for NY's Strongest to come pick it up, and Bam. The streets will now, until probably late September, smell like the trash chute in a rent-controlled apartment that the landlord has been trying to drive people out of for the last 50 years.

Used to be that, while the streets occasionally reeked, the smell would be diminished once the big white trucks came around and took the crap to Staten Island, where it belongs. I can remember the summer of 1998, when I was living in the Village and used to walk to work every morning along Houston Street. Monday mornings, with a full weekend's worth of restaurant and bar garbage, plus all the weekend's leftover puke on the streets, were barely tolerable. But by mid-week, you could almost make it 5 blocks without wishing you'd brought some of that stuff that Jodie Foster puts under her nostrils before checking out the body of the GreatBigFatPerson Buffalo Bill had taken care of.

Now, even when they've come to take the garbage away, the stench lingers. Summer in New York has its benefits, like the fact that all kinds of people leave on the weekends to go to the Hamptons and other stupid places that probably smell better. But, Jesus, can we get some big ass Stick-Ups on the streetlights or something?