Ignore the Crazies

Rob and I were walking with two friends Sunday night back to their apartment after a few beers. One of them pitched an empty Chapstick container at a nearby trashcan, and it bounced off and rolled into the pile of garbage bags stacked next to it. He shrugged and kept walking; no one in their right mind is going to stick their hand into a pile of trash bags in New York City to fish out a small piece of garbage; hell, I wouldn't do it, and I generally break out in hives if I so much as drop a gum wrapper.

"You missed!" said a woman, who was walking two paces behind us.

"Yeah..." said Rob's friend, and I tried to go back to the story I was telling.

"Pick it up!" she yelled. "Don't be a hypocrite!"

Because this particular friend of Rob's has the "I need to get the last word in" gene, he continued to banter back and forth with her for a good solid five minutes, and she called him all sorts of names. I was so, so, so uncomfortable and freaked out.

I'm pretty sure the first rule of walking around New York City is "Don't talk to the crazy people that yell things at you on the street". (Maybe the second, the first being, "Hey fannypack-wearing tourists, get the FUCK out of my way if you want to look up at 'Awl 'dem tawl buildin's!'") If you walk around New York City long enough, someone WILL yell something at you about the gays going to hell, or the end of the world, or space aliens, or they'll just say, "Hey, look!" and show you their small, dirty, limp penis, and you need to ignore it.

I would expect a New Yorker to know this, but something else must have taken over his COMMON FRIGGING SENSE.

It was one of the lowlights of my week.