The Great Shoveling Irony

As I waddled my way to the train stop this morning, over an entire block-length of three inch ice-slush (that's an inch of ice, covered by an inch of slush, covered by another layer of hard ice over top that cracks and splashes when you step over the fossilized footprints of the Slushozoic Era below. Oh, and there's water on top of that, like the Devil's slip and slide. It's perfect inspiration for next year's Winter Wipeout course.), I couldn't help but get really, really mad at Mayor Bloomberg. He is the guy to go after, afterall, right?

My superintendent gets up at the crack of dawn every day to scrape off whatever weather poop the skies have dropped in front of my apartment. He does some good old fashioned shoveling, salt sprinkling and pathway carving that makes it pretty a-ok to get up and out of the house. Everyone else on my block does the same. And the restaurants and store fronts do it 10 times better still, lest they catch me off guard on a bad day and get their asses SUED, mother fucker!

So why does the next block, with public park to the north and stalled construction to the south, sit completely unkempt and totally treacherous? Is this not the great hypocrisy of our time?

Don't shovel out your building? Get a hefty ticket. Don't clear your store front? Feel the wrath the of the civil suit, and a get hefty ticket. In fact, the law says you have a mere four hours to clear a path in front of your building. Violators can get a $150 citation from any city sanitation worker, not just police. And yet the city is all la-dee-da about their own properties. To put it in Sarah Palin's recent, brilliant words: WTF?

I think all of the people that cite poor shoveling and write tickets should be put to work hacking at the ice mounds piling up along abandoned buildings, city parks, and --hello?!-- every street corner in the entire city. How is it acceptable to leave snow compacted into the sewers, and allow five inch deep lakes of murky, city slush water to form around every one? And when I say every one, I don't even mean just NYC anymore. That goes for you too, Boston and Philly, and I would assume every other major city that gets snow.

Is there no way to solve this problem? The great minds in America have come together to create the a-bomb, perform stem cell miracles, put spaceships on Mars, but shit... how do we get the snow off of public property? How do we do it? I hope whoever gives the next State of the Union Address is sure to include this issue in the agenda. It is truly one of the great challenges of our time.

That's it. No facts. No solutions. Just rant.


The end.

PS - that woman is having the best day everrr!