I saw the Naked Cowboy in person for the first time yesterday. I didn’t get too close a look, but I could have sworn that he was using his trademark briefs as advertising space. Naked Cowboy, presented by Charmin? What other symptoms of a sick society do we need to see before someone (other than Cameron Crowe) shuts down Times Square entirely? That place is what selling your soul would look like if it were embodied in city blocks (Legally Blonde is about to be a musical, by the way), and yet somehow I found myself in the middle of the day wandering through the place I typically avoid like the Plague.
The very well-lit, crowded Plague.
The thing is that, in addition to being a clear sign of the impending apocalypse, a trip through Times Square changes your day. At the very least, it changes mine, because it tends to break me of my habit of being oblivious to the absurdity around me.
Every time we walk down the street, Nick tries to point out interesting people. Being a polite man, he typically waits for a few moments after we have passed the person in question before sarcastically shredding them. In addition to making it slightly less likely that he is mocking someone who is right there, this ensures that I will have no idea what he is talking about. That’s right: in the middle of one of the craziest cities in the world, I tend to notice none of it. I’m busy thinking, or some such nonsense.
After my pilgrimage through Times Square, though, I began to notice. Like the guy on the cell phone on a ritzy Midtown street who sounded like he might actually be having an aneurysm–apparently he had written the thing, then attached the wrong file, can’t you FUCKING UNDERSTAND THAT?? He was seriously turning purple. And the woman in the trench coat leaning out to see if the train was coming (because we all do that, as if it will help) who managed to look just like an old photo of my mother when she was pretending to steal newspapers. And the two college students on the train who had both worked making cold calls, and were swapping horror stories that probably should have made me feel compassion, but mostly just made me wonder who first decided that it would be okay to call a total stranger and ask them for anything.
Seriously. The Do Not Call list is all that prevented me from becoming a raving sociopath.
Does the irony of resenting my hypothetically invaded privacy while eavesdropping on people and then writing about them on the Internet appeal to anyone else? Take a walk on 42nd Street, and all that pesky moral ambiguity will clear right up.