Who's To Blame

In a crisis, I can tell you who it's not

Greetings from balmy Brooklyn, where temperatures have finally breached 30 degrees. I took a writer’s block walk today in just a tshirt, sweatshirt, and a coat and felt on top of the world (except for the writer’s block that powering through Gowanus around the canal shockingly did not automatically fix).

I shouldn’t even really comment on the weather because I luckily was free from the frigid clutches of last weekend in New York because I was on my family vacation. The trip itself was great, but it was bookended by two absolute crises that left me wondering, “Who can I be mad at about this?”

Let’s back up a bit, to two weeks ago. It’s been brutal on the east coast all month, freezing temps, actual snow accumulation, brutal winds that make your eyes water when you’re walking even when you wear sunglasses and then end up with literal ice on your face from the air freezing your tears. I had a busy week of running around doing spots and going to parties and was so excited for a chill weekend home from Friday to Sunday to lay low and clean before a few days of writing and then off to my family trip to Aruba. I tend to plan my weekends to be as empty as possible, because my weeks are like many people’s weekends and filled with nights out and restaurant meals. So weekends I’m like oh I can clean up, I can cook, I can spend a night in just chilling or bop around the neighborhood with no real plan. And on the off chance something outrageously fun pops up, boom, I’m already free.

Friday I did my normal day of recording Ruined and then some writing and after a long week of being with people, I wanted to go do my favorite thing: sit at a bar and eat and drink alone for a minute. I had an intense craving for a wrap that I get at a spot near me that’s just a neighborhood bar with a few shockingly good food items. I love a good bar menu, but I also am someone who eats a lot of vegetables, so many bar food menus leave me lacking. But near me at Gowanus Gardens they have a wrap where you can get their incredible salad (mixed greens, red cabbage, shredded carrot, shallot, pepitas, in a miso vinaigrette) with some chopped up crispy chicken thighs. It’s a perfect meal. I go out of my way to get it every once in a while. I had that and two margaritas and the single digit temperatures melted into my memory.

My friend Julia was leaving work (well, leaving drinking at work) and swung by my place as I got home to just hang and have a drink and then we could each go to bed very early but drunk. The ideal Friday night in your 40s, honestly. When I got back to my place the elevators were off so I told her hey, just take the stairs. In my apartment one of my lights wouldn’t turn on. It was odd, but not exactly shocking bc I’ve been here for many years at this point and sometimes a light bulb goes out. Julia came over and we had some palomas and gossiped and then some other lights went out, kind of one by one in a way that felt less like a power outage and more like someone was possibly coming to kill us.

A bit later my neighbor knocked on my door and was like “Ummm...do you have power?” She seemingly didn’t have heat or lights, but I had a smattering of lights and my heat seemed to still be on for the time being. She and I had of course crossed paths a bunch coming in and out of our doors over the last six years but never really like, sat down to be like “Who are you?” She asked me the question I was dying for every neighbor I’ve ever had to ask me. She said, “Do you want to seen in my apartment?” MORE THAN ANYTHING. I saw her place (shockingly similar to mine, lol) and met her large, orange cat named Eggs. I returned the favor and showed her around my place and she met the man of the house, Rizz. Then we held our cats in our respective doors so they could see each other. They did not like that.

I woke up the next morning to all of my power out except for my bedroom heater and a few lights and outlets in there. Living room heater off, living room and kitchen lights off, appliances off, fridge dark and warming, no tv, no internet, no nothing. My smoke alarms started chirping and my neighbor and I met in our dark corner of the hall to discuss next moves. I texted the super to see if he could come help me shut my smoke alarms up, and he was already busy running around the building putting out (metaphorical) fires as most of the building lost some kind of power. Another apartment on our hall opened his door and asked us if we had power and we were like no dude, no one has power. I asked if he knew how to dismantle our smoke alarms and he said, “I’ll ask Chat GPT.” I went in my apartment and shut my door, that is too stupid a response for me to deal with.

Our super showed up to my place overworked and underslept and quickly made the chirping stop. He explained that Con Ed notified us that basically our whole corner of the neighborhood was having power issues. His phone was buzzing as every maniac in our building was flipping out and demanding him to answer for these issues and help them out. I told him I was fine, don’t worry about me. I still had one heater and some lights and an outlet, I’ll get by.

I took a shower in the dark and eventually my friend Zach in the building next door was like “Okay I’m so bored and I’m cold what do we do?” The answer was we should just go to the bar where our friend Audrey worked and sit and drink because there was literally nothing else to do. I found I can only lay on my bed and look at my phone for so long before even that is boring.

We did that, but first I was able to get answers on what was going on. In New York, when it snows, they salt the streets. This seems fine and like a solid solution to dangerous driving conditions. However, our power grid is underground, and as salt melts the snow it turns into salt water, which then seeps under the street and causes fires that explode out of manholes and shorts out the electrical grid. This is exactly what happened and it left like ten square blocks without power, over 1900 apartments. Zach and I saw this was the case on our walk west to Smith street as we passed several Con Ed trucks manned by bundled up employees descending down below the city, sadly not to go hang out with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at their home.

Rizz did NOT enjoy his time at the hotel.

By Sunday I had lost complete power, no heat, no lights. I had day beers with Robert and then Julia and Lane thankfully had me over for a home cooked chicken parm and salad dinner and several rounds of espresso martinis. Thanks to a joint and more vodka I was ready to sleep through anything and went home to sleep in the cold dark apartment. By Monday Con Ed kept kicking the service restoration deadline down the road. Since Friday night, they moved it back 12 hours every 6 hours, so it was truly a weekend of just constant disappointment as deadlines approached and then suddenly the moment of relief felt further and further away. I had zero confidence in them to get things working anytime soon, and Rizz and I needed to go somewhere with electricity. I checked into the hotel nearby which despite being close, had full power and had become kind of a beacon of heat and television for others in the neighborhood suffering the same outage.

Every time I came in and out of the building, my poor super was sitting at the door to either let people in (since our stupid doors are opened by a key fob and there’s no manual alternative) or rushing up and down halls trying to quell people’s fears and somehow advise them on something he had no idea how to advise them on? Should they stay or go? He told me someone asked for a space heater and he was like, “But you don’t have power, how would you run it?”

By Monday lunchtime everything was back up and running, Rizz and I returned from our traumatic hotel stay, and aside from being just wrung out physically and mentally, I was fine. Every time I saw our super I thanked him profusely for his hard work. It wasn’t his fault, what was he supposed to do? It didn’t surprise me but it did bum me out that aside from my neighbor across the hall and I seemed to be the only ones who were figuring things out on our own and not bothering him or yelling at him about something he clearly could not fix and could only try and help navigate.

Thank god by the next polar vortex, I was already comfortably in Aruba, reading at the beach and sipping Balashis in the pool. I felt bad leaving New York during another crisis as my friends texted me that they physically couldn’t even go outside because it was so cold. I hate not being in New York when it’s bad. I was here through blizzards and heat waves, through Hurricane Sandy and Covid and Bill DiBlasio dropping and killing the groundhog. But I felt I earned this trip away during a rough time. My power outage nightmare earned me five days in paradise reading near my parents.

The trip was great. I could have written a newsletter just about how family vacations are nice or questioning why reading a book is just more enjoyable on vacation. I didn’t want to leave, I wanted to stay in a place where my day revolved around pool bingo and lunch beers (to be clear, it still sometimes involves lunch beers). Instead I now must tell you about my hellish time getting off a very happy island.

Why did I even bother leaving?

I booked a later flight at 4:50pm so I could at least have some morning beach time and eat some real lunch before being trapped at the airport for a while and on a four plus hour journey back to JFK. When the bus dropped me off at the airport, the driver told me and the two other people that actually, there had been a security issue at the airport and it had just closed and been evacuated and now everyone who was inside is outside. He then learned that someone on an arriving flight claimed there was a bomb on board, and that was what shut things down. Who brings a bomb TO a vacation?

After a few minutes in an idling bus I figured well, they’re going to reopen at some point and I imagine that will be a line, and I may as well get in that line sooner than later. When I got to the area outside check in, people were already kind of lined up under some tents but with no rhyme or reason. I parked it at what I assumed was the “end” of a “line” and just kind of stood around on my phone, soaking up the last warm weather I would see probably until June knowing how the weather has been in New York this year already.

I was alone in my acceptance of whatever this would be. Everyone was yelling and ranting and screaming at every airport employee who walked by, demanding information that clearly no one had. I was lucky to be traveling alone and to not have to manage other people’s stresses in my own party. I had a phone, headphones, a crossword. I can kill time. When it was clear that this line system wasn’t going to hold and everyone was just milling around, I went and leaned against a wall of the airport in the shade and then was joined by a deeply annoying couple. They kept loudly talking passive aggressively about the staff when they were in earshot. “I mean, I would ask her but she clearly doesn’t fucking know anything,” “All these people around an no one will even tell us if our plane has arrived yet!” “Yeah, like he’s going to be any help!” they said just feet away from employees who just did NOT ask for this to happen.

Everyone was freaking out but honestly, no one was missing a flight because no planes were coming or going from the airport until they had cleared the security, gotten the employees back in, and then got passengers back into the airport. Yes I get that connecting flights were a crisis and that people had rides and pets and family and jobs they needed to deal with. My major concern was that there aren’t many food options in the Aruba airport and I hadn’t brought my normal plane snacks, so the longer this went on, the hungrier I was going to get.

When they finally got things reopened (maybe 45 min or an hour max after I arrived in the parking lot), the employees did their best to communicate with an entire airport’s worth of people with flights ranging from should have already left to weren’t going to leave for two hours even if things were on time. And every single person had to go through customs and get back in the airport through security. It was no small feat. And once it was going, I would say it took about one hour from standing around outside to being in front of my gate. It can take more than that on a busy Friday at JFK if you don’t have pre-check. I was genuinely impressed at how smoothly the airport (a small one at that) managed to navigate this problem. The only thing that made it intolerable was the people.

Once inside, I bee-lined for my go-to place to hunker down when I’m on my return flight. There’s a great Aruba themed bar where you can get mini beers, but even on a quiet day at that airport it gets busy. But last year I found a wine bar toward the end of the terminal that is almost always empty. Before the bomb threat I planned to pull out my laptop, have a big cold rose, and maybe snack on some mediocre cheese until my flight. Instead I got there and it was slammed like it was a Thursday night in Murray Hill. The bar was two to three people deep standing. Imagine standing at an airport bar. I pulled off to lean on a wall and two women let me lean in and order a mezcal rocks (we needed to upgrade from airport wine to real stuff). They also very kindly let me plug my phone into the outlet under the bar near their seats and leave my phone there to charge since I blew through the battery trying to entertain myself while on line.

I had no problem just chilling with my drink. My flight had been delayed a bunch so I had time, and at some point a seat would open up as someone’s flight actually left. I finished my first drink and watched people angrily circle the bar looking for space as if the rest of us just didn’t think to look for open chairs. Several couples sat having finished their drinks taking up space, which is rude but not illegal. One loud couple was playing a stupid game and I had to try hard not to shoot dirty looks. A group of four men seemingly direct from a golf course asked the one woman behind the bar if she could ask people to leave so they could sit down. I clocked her face working overtime not to contort to express her true feelings, but she managed to just smile and say she can’t really do that and then go back to the bar to roll her eyes so far back into her head she almost fell over.

One bartender brought me a stool from the back room so I could perch against the wall, the lone solo traveler who was just trying to quietly drink away any stress of this experience. When a couple asked for the bill, he came to grab me to make sure I got to saddle up to the bar at the nice leather stool with a back instead of my bizarre corner. I ordered another drink and tipped in cash with a $20. When you work at an airport wine bar I assume you never expect a huge rush, let alone to be in the weeds like this poor staff was.

That Pinot Grigio isn’t a country club pour, that’s a fuck you and your shitty attitude pour.

A group of true psychopaths next to me were getting drunk and I was praying they weren’t on my flight. Their vibe wasn’t as much tristate area as Carolina Republicans, so I felt somewhat safe. An older gal ordered a “double Pinot Grigio” which is the kind of thing you only order at an airport bar or a country club that doesn’t allow Jews. He poured a very healthy glass of white wine and also handed her friend his red. She looked at both glasses and was like “that’s not a double!” as if he was trying to stiff her (honestly, she didn’t need more wine). She wouldn’t let it go and finally he just emptied the entire bottle left into her glass, the pale yellow wine nearly reaching the rim of the giant glass. Happy now, bitch? Enjoy your shit wine, I hope you get acid reflux.

Eventually I left and arrived back in freezing Brooklyn to Rizz and my own bed and crashed super hard and it was all fine. Obviously, I was frustrated that I got home so late that I couldn’t take the AirTran, that I got less sleep than I wanted, that I had to ask my friend Andrea upstairs to give Rizz some extra food just in case things really went off the deep end. But overall, whatever, it happens. I’ve had plenty of bad travel experiences and everyone involved seemed to do their best.

But during both the power outage and the bomb scare, I hated watching the other people around me absolutely lose their goddamn minds. I know we’re all riding a razor’s edge of sanity right now in the world. The news is overwhelming, winter is oppressive, most jobs are bad if they exist, no one is working, everyone is getting ghosted by HR and by prospective relationships, there aren’t happy hours or sales anymore and everything is expensive and no one is coming to save us.

That is not the fault of the people around you who are unfortunately tasked with navigating whatever new crisis has popped up to ruin your life. I get it! I wanted someone to yell at, but sadly I don’t know the head of Con Ed nor the person who called in a bomb threat to a tropical paradise, so I had to just fucking deal. My super certainly wasn’t to blame and did more than his best to make sure everyone in our building was warm and safe as much as he could. The freezing cold technicians of Con Ed who were braving the fiery man holes and freezing temperatures to try and fix our crumbling power grid weren’t to blame. The gate attendants and security personnel of the airport couldn’t just say, “Fuck it, just go on in” to people (who all had too many bags...) after a literal bomb scare threatened the entire airport. It’s not their fault. Do not take the understandable amount of frustration and rage you have built up inside of you on the people who are actually trying to do anything to fix it.

Save that rage for the systems. They were built to fall apart, to make things harder. Brooklyn’s terrible old power grid and refusal to find a de-icing solution for the street beyond salt is the problem. A world where airports are places of general terror and agonizing bureaucracy is why any threat to safety upsets the entire day of travel for everyone. We need to demand more. We need more from our infrastructure. We need high speed rail and universal basic income and walkable cities and easily navigable online portals. We need environmentally sound ways to manage weather emergencies. We need actual checks and balances and for people who do terrible things to be actually held accountable. We need so many things.

What we don’t need is to yell at and be rude to the people around us working to fix the problems we have. Be nice. Tip in cash. Calm the hell down.

MORE STUFF! MORE STUFF!
Omg while I was on vacation I TORE THROUGH Zahra Tangorra’s forthcoming memoir, Extra Sauce. It doesn’t come out until this spring but you can pre-order now. She’s a brilliant writer with a great story and some of my favorite recipes sprinkled throughout the book (um, hi, the iconic tomato butter). Do yourself a favor and order it now so that come April it’s waiting for you in your mailbox and you can start reading.

This week on Ruined we went camping with Significant Other.

I was on my good buddies Jon Gabrus and Adam Pally’s podcast Staying Alive this week. I mean, we recorded a while ago, but still, you can listen now!

I’m taking another stab at my new stand-up hour about almost dying, For This?, at Union Hall Saturday 3/7 at 7:30. Come see what I’m working on.

And every week until July 7, a reminder to pre-order my debut book of essays, I’m A Lot wherever you get your books!