EDGE on the Net

Every summer in New York I hear new theories for the insanity, and every summer they’re proved wrong. They tell me it’s the economy that made the well-dressed businessman with the briefcase spit on me for no apparent reason other than I was walking my dog on our shared sidewalk, yet his neighbors told me of fancy summer homes and fancier girlfriends.

They blame texters and talkers for ruining all forms of theatrical entertainment, when it’s really the rave reviews for "Next to Normal" that have forced theatergoers to waste money on another Broadway musical that makes the 42nd Street Wax Museum seem lifelike. "Bruno" takes shots at straight people, GLAAD takes shots at "Bruno," and no one wins when brave, smart comedies are derided by the very same people who applaud sex changes and standing up against conformity. Expect to see more PC flicks with beautiful brides, sophomoric bad boys, and at least one vomit sequence.

They can’t blame the heat, as we haven’t had any. We blame Global Warming for adding a chill to our fears. The citizens blame the cops, the cops blame the citizens, and the President has promised to blame bigots once Ellen Degeneres gets arrested in her home. Only Verizon’s not blaming anyone as they roll out their "Can you arrest me now!" campaign. I was playing my new favorite celebrity game, "Dead or Alive...Today!" when I figured out that balconies should take the blame.

New York City is chockfull of skyscraper apartments, glorious in their design; even more glorious in that they contain the one thing we’ve craved since Lauren Bacall, Betty Grable, and Marilyn Monroe schemed to marry a millionaire on their Upper East Side highrise -- a terrace. Yet, wander around our city and you’ll notice something deathly wrong up above; nobody uses them. The balconies in Manhattan are as empty as the storefronts on Madison Avenue. Pure, open-air havens that occasionally see a few plants or an old chained-up bicycle, but nary a human being, unless it’s a maid. Tenants, they say, are off at their summer homes or too busy working and don’t have time to relax and reflect, and I blame them for that waste of idyllic space.

In summer, gay men go relationship AWOL and blame the humidity, social networking sites, and half-naked drink fests for bottoming out with the latest tops. I blame men, as we’re all pigs in the end. My massage therapist, so grave and somber he wouldn’t know a Happy Ending if it bit him in the ass (literally), blames youth culture for my back pain, telling me that, once over the age of thirty, men shouldn’t take bootcamp classes or high-impact aerobics or the stairs. He can blame my senility when I forget to pay him. The language barrier is to blame when my gym’s new Romanian fitness instructor with the six-pack abs and dumb-bell eyes tells me to eat less sugar and work out more. He’ll never make it in America unless he learns that the English translation is "If you blow me, the first session is free." Like I said, pigs.

Politicians blame God for their affairs, as he’s evidently an enabler. People blamed me for being blasphemous when I wrote that God was suing Christianity for Defamation of Character. I could have cited war, prejudice, bigotry, and murder in His name as reason for the lawsuit, but I have more solid evidence: I spoke to God and he told me so. He blames all of you for ignoring His word as translated through my Tweets. He’ll forgive you if you buy my book.

Intellectuals blame celebrity culture for the madness, and Rupert Everett, showing no sympathy over tea, says Michael Jackson lucked out by dying before people saw him crash and burn in an attempt to resurrect the freak show. Mr. Everett does have a point, even if the emotions were hard to translate coming from his own restructured face. After the death of Farrah and Michael and Eddie Murphy’s film career, Walter Cronkite only represented the way things used to be. Those men who walked on the moon could never compete with the Moonwalk. When Academy Award-winning actor Karl Malden died and broke my friend’s "It always happens in threes" mystical theory, he rationalized the discrepancy like a Darwin scholar: "He was ninety-seven; it doesn’t count."

My mom flat-out blames June, July, and August for death, telling me that "more people die in summer. It’s sad because you wait all year for the nice weather, and then you die." I blame Gidget, the talking Chihuahua, who died at the age of fifteen, for my own disillusionment. Turns out her "Yo Quiero Taco Bell" catch-phrase was actually dubbed by a human voice. I’m not mad at her agents, but I’m sickened when I think how much better movies would have been over the past twenty years if Keanu Reeves’ emotions were dubbed by a human actor.

I can’t even shop to alleviate the stress of unpaid credit-card bills. I got all psyched to purchase one of the Pitchman Billy Mays’ new cleaning products until I noticed the "lifetime guarantee" fine print. Now my floors are starting to sink in mud and smell and turn green, much like Washington’s National Mall, the "Front Yard of America" that patriotic Republicans refuse to allot money to revitalize. Pigs prefer to roll in shit.

Perhaps I’ve been too hard on those balconies and the man with the briefcase who spit on my face. On that lovely summer’s eve, the businessman was heading into his own terraced highrise on the Upper East Side, three blocks away from the mayor’s mansion. If I’d passed by a minute earlier, I would have missed him, and the expression of outrage would have remained locked up.

Maybe in that briefcase lay the foundations of our day, opening up to highway texters and talkers proven to be the equivalent of drunk drivers, downing chats over bridges and intersections and past schools and baby carriages. He might have stopped seeing movies altogether, after attending an eight o’clock showing of the new blockbuster, only to find that the film started at 8:35, after the popcorn was gone, the drink diminished, and before the kids got their neon-lit phones out to enjoy the show with their connected friends.

Maybe that summer home’s on the market, the law firm he works for on the verge of collapsing. Perhaps his girlfriend wants a younger man, while his wife gets carved and implanted and sliced, so she can cheat death in the celebrity circus. Maybe all the pills and doctors and faith in God can’t stop the imperfections and pain anymore than a dead adman can. Perhaps he resents in-your-face faggots like me, nothing more than predators, who’ve invaded his landscape-safe neighborhood. Or he misses the day when police were friends and America the Beautiful was not a contradiction. Maybe he thought the moon-lit summer of 1969 was a peek into heaven’s glory forthcoming. Or perhaps there was no one waiting for him when he opened his own front door.

He might have taken that briefcase and opened it up on his glorious terrace overlooking the thrill of Manhattan. Perhaps he’d start to cry, and before he could manage to snap it shut, he’d lean over and slip on his own wet ice.