My Life as a Neighborhood Crank
When you have no job, and too much time on your hands, the little things begin to grate.
zannews
On a hot Tuesday afternoon, a German shepherd met my gaze as he emptied his bowels on the Brooklyn sidewalk. The man holding the leash was large and bald and wearing a tank top. As he turned to walk away, I shot him a look.
“You gonna get that?” I asked.
Lately, I’ve been what can euphemistically be described as “under-scheduled,” and it’s leading to some troubling behavior.
Yesterday I snapped a picture of a black Mercedes G-wagon parked in a crosswalk. A few days before that, I called the health department about a bird feeder that, I’m convinced, is the source of a local rat resurgence. Last week, I stopped by my local council woman’s office to ask just how many new neighbors she expects to be moving into the roughly 647 residential buildings rising up close to where I live.
These are the actions of a man with few daily distractions like, say, child care or fantasy football, or full-time employment. In the past few years, I watched one chosen profession (magazine journalism) wither away and get handed off to cheaper, better hydrated people. Then the industry I’d fled to, software, admitted it was kidding when it said content was king and replaced its English majors with ChatGPT. Even my side hustle — producing podcasts that don’t feature sitcom stars making small talk with their friends — went sideways.
Now, for the first time in my adult life, there’s usually nowhere I have to be. No one is waiting for me to show up. No actions are required of me. No contributions are expected. And while this may sound glorious on paper, in real life it feels like a terrifying step toward extinction.
But it’s only terrifying because of who this extra time affords me to be. I don’t want to speak to the manager, exactly, but when you have too much time on your hands, it’s easy to spend that time paying attention to things you have no business paying attention to, like other people’s dog poop.
Just ask the man in the tank top, who was already walking away when I called out to him again: “Wait. You’re just gonna leave it there?”
He wheeled around and fired off a succinct stream of invective that I won’t repeat here, except to note that somewhere in there was the word Yuppie.
To be fair, I’m neither young nor upwardly mobile, and while I was tempted to challenge him on his grasp of the ’80s-era acronym, the guy had a point. Minding one’s business is a bedrock feature of the New York social contract, one that arguably supersedes all other issues, including the collective responsibility to maintain a feces-free sidewalk.
Just don’t tell that to me or seemingly anyone who lived in New York before the Dinkins administration. I’m generalizing, but older New Yorkers seem to care less about defending the laissez-faire portions of the social contract, because they’re tired of watching all the other portions get trampled. By now, they’re less “live and let live” and more “keep your overpriced Mercedes jeep off the sidewalk.”
And I’m starting to think they’re right. Call it early onset geriatrics. Symptoms include overfamiliarity with your mail carrier and simply noticing things no normal person should notice, like the recycling habits of neighbors, the noise levels of construction sites, the velocity of the electric scooters flying by in the bike lane. Maybe it’s a natural progression, an acceptable response to suddenly having so much time after decades of having too little.
A few years back, I submitted to a battery of tests designed to gauge my biological age. There were some fairly sophisticated biomarkers — telomere length, glycomics, et al. — that in aggregate produced a number independent of my chronological age. I was low-key pleased — “smug” might be the word for it — to learn that my so-called biological age was six or seven years below the number of candles on my last birthday cake. Yay me.
But in these months of unemployment, I’ve been experiencing something like the opposite. The thing that no one tells you about getting laid off is how it ages you. Not physically, but socially, behaviorally.
The aging doesn’t come from money worries or self-doubt (though those exact their own psychic toll) but by being sidelined from the hustle and flow of daily life. Even with so many people working from home with their filthy athleisure and their overnight oats, the day belongs to the working. And if you’re not working, you may as well be invisible. Irrelevant, as the kids say with their casual cruelty.
Time doesn’t pass quickly enough for people with too much of it. Where I once prayed for another hour in the day, I’m now often happy to learn it’s later than I thought. Oh, is the sun up? Cool. I can stop pretending I’m going to fall back asleep and start drinking coffee and staring at my phone. Nearly dark … is it too soon to start dinner?
