New York was Cool; Hope I Didn't Cause an International Incident on My Birthday.

Went to New York this weekend. It was awesome. I ate and drank all sorts of treats (the Vietnamese just might have overtaken the Cubans in the great sandwich wars), saw this really cool lounge singer/comedian guy, hung out with some good friends, put an old French lady in the hospital, got some culture and learning at some museums, yeah, New York, that town really has its stuff together. If you get a chance, book a flight right now, because - what's that? Oh yeah, the French lady.

I rented a bike on my birthday and my friend Curt took me on this long tour through Brooklyn. It was awesome. We went through all these cool little neighborhoods and parks, went over that bridge from "Once Upon a Time in America," rode to Coney Island like in that Ramones song, and just had a great time. I got to see all sorts of cool stuff, like this:


And the opening shot of that old "Barney Miller" show.


We crossed over to Manhattan in the early afternoon. We were going pretty fast in the bike lane through all this crazy traffic, and Curt had been warning me all day to watch out for people opening car doors into the street, so I was being pretty safe and paying attention.

Then this old French lady materialized right in front of me in the bike lane.

I didn't have time to slam on the brakes or swerve or anything really and the next thing I know I'm on the ground. I ask the woman if she's alright and I go to put my bike on the sidewalk when some dudes say, "Where do you think you're going? You're not going anywhere."

"Yeah, I'm not going anywhere," I said a little more forcefully than usual. "I'm just putting the bike up on the curb. I thought New Yorkers were all blase about people getting stabbed and mugged and stuff, somehow my accident happens in front of Batman.

Now if professional wrestling and shennanigan-related incidents have taught us anything, it's that cuts to the head will produce a whole lot of blood. So she didn't look good. She also got a pretty good shiner. By the time I was up the paramedics had been called and some of the crowd had sort of patched her up with some napkins. She didn't speak any English, and her daughter didn't speak much more, so that didn't help, either.

The paramedics examine her and take one of the napkins off her head. I was sort of wondering how bad it really was when I see this massive patch of blood and flesh. Holy crap, I really hurt her, I thought. Then I realized that that was just a napkin underneath the other one that had soaked up all the blood. She had a small cut and seemed to be OK from what everyone could make out what with the language barrier and all, but she went off to the hospital for stitches or catscans or whatever anyway.

I dealt with the cops who were pretty cool about the whole thing. I got an incident report that I have to call about in case anything else happens. I really wanted to take some photos, but I figured that wouldn't be too cool, so I only snapped this one on the sly:



And that's how I spent my birthday. I hope she's feeling better and this didn't color her impressions on her American vacation.

So remember, always wear a helmet and look both ways before crossing the street.

By the way, uh...does anyone know anything about ribs? Mine still sort of hurt when I breath in deeply.