Day 301: I’d Rather Get More Accurate Notifications [Friday Thoughts W/ TeeCoZee]

Good Moleman. Let that be a lesson, kids. Never try. If you want some butter, it’s under my face. It’s Friday, July 16th, Two0TwoOne. The weather in Astoria is 85˚ & Pantone 15-3919 and somewhere, somebody is trying to fry an egg on the pavement. Somebody else is trying to cool off with frozen peas. Somebody else is eating ice cream for breakfast. Somebody else is melting an army guy with a magnifying glass. Somebody else is taking a cold shower. Little do they know, it’s not really an escape from the heat. Instead of feeling better about the weather, they are littering, cooking mashed peas, consuming dairy in the sun, becoming a psychopath and lowering their tolerance for heat, respectively. And me? I work in a 60˚ store and live in central air. Your peasant heat only affects me for 20 minutes a day. But boy, am I affected by it. I also have some things on my mind…

– I don’t even remember signing up for it, but I’ve been getting text alerts from Con-Ed. Not about actual outages that occur, but more like self-encouraging texts claiming that I shouldn’t worry about their ability to do their job. For the last three weeks, I’ve received the same text from them, claiming that they’re ready for the heat wave in my area. And while I trust that my power won’t go out due to heat, I think it’s about time that they change their wording. If there’s a “heat wave” 3 weeks in a row, it just becomes “heat”. There’s no wave about it. It’s been constantly fucking hot. Even when it wasn’t hot, it was too humid to even breathe. It’s summer. The ice caps are melting. There is heat. Stop calling it a heat wave. This is our life now, deal with it. If Con-Ed wants to spam text me to reassure me that they can take the heat, that’s fine. But stop calling it a heatwave when it’s clearly just our summer climate now.

What’s also concerning is that in those 3 weeks, we had a full-on tropical storm go through New York. Areas experienced flash flooding and above-ground power lines went down. People had to wade through garbage water up to their chest to get on the subway. People abandoned their cars because they couldn’t make it across the lake that formed on the FDR. In fact, the Con-Ed substation a mere few blocks away from us caught fire. Not once did Con-Ed go out of their way to text me reassurances about the storm. Which makes me believe that they were not ready for the storm, even though they knew a week ahead of time that it was coming. I feel like being ready for a storm is more important than being ready for heat, but what do I know? I’m not a con, nor am I an ed. I’m a Troy. I sell groceries.

– Back when we lived in a more violent and shitty neighborhood, we downloaded the fear-mongering Citizen app. For those that have been living under a rock or anywhere that’s not a metropolitan area, Citizen is essentially a user-aggregated millennial substitute to the local news. It’s nothing but reports of crime happening in your area, along with video, police scanner footage and people commenting about how the mayor should resign. In other words, it’s the local news, your paranoid uncle’s garage and Facebook all rolled into one. While I still use the app just to see how shitty lower Manhattan has become, some of the alerts are just odd. Once, there was a report of 60 men brawling on a street corner. It turns out, there was no brawl and somebody was just playing too much Shenmue. Or you’ll get a report of a missing child found, but never an alert that the child was missing in the first place. But as I was about to go to bed last night, I got an alert that made my jaw drop:

Police are establishing a crime scene in Astoria. Use caution in the area.

I had to read it several times because I was half asleep. But there’s actually a lot to unpack here. It seems that there isn’t a crime scene yet. It’s not quite there, but the police are going to “establish” it. Either they are going to deem a random location a crime scene or they are going to do crime themselves. Either way, it’s shady as fuck. The cops shouldn’t be establishing anything except safety, reassurance and donut farts. It’s not their job to establish, they need to attend to what has already been established. Also, use caution in the area?!? Astoria is fucking huge, which area are we supposed to use caution in? Like the whole 5.2 square miles that the neighborhood encompasses? Is everyone in the neighborhood supposed to just walk around slowly until the police establish a more specific crime scene?

– Last week, The Thoughts were a lot easier to write. Throughout the week, I started a list of stupid observances and I sat down on Friday fully prepared. But after spending all of this week in a panicked haze, I failed to write anything wrong. Which I feel like is counter-productive. In times where I’m not establishing firm memories, I should be taking more notes. But instead, I took no notes at all. I should probably work on that. Err, I should work on not being panicky first. Derp.

– Try this trick over the weekend: Take notes. Life moves too fast these days, we need a way to slow it down.

Have an observant weekend, everyone!

– TeeCoZee