Kick in the Head

Twice a week I get out of kung fu class in the late evening and the fruit/veggie markets around the corner usually have a few last things that they’re trying to sell. Sometimes it looks like three people standing around one bunch of fruit. It’s almost as if they’re special fruit somehow that they’ve been entrusted with. Oftentimes it’s literally underneath a light similar to in the comic. Since I know Chinatown markets usually take the oldest veggies to sell, what does that say about the ones that they’re trying to sell 8:00-9:00pm at night that they couldn’t sell during the day?

I see this guy in Chinatown sometimes just selling completely random crap. I saw him yesterday selling big sheets of Spider-Man stickers. He didn’t even have a ghetto sort of table with a variety of stuff, he was just standing in a bank of pay phones holding the sheets of stickers in his hand. Clearly no one was paying attention to him, I mean how random is that?

Look hard enough and you can find a lot of stuff being sold on the streets of New York. Virtually all of them make sense to me from the people selling the glass pipes, random little buttons, bubble guns or incense. Even the people who go through trash and find anything that looks like someone could possibly buy like one left shoe or some random audio cassette tapes or batteries. Those all make sense. But just selling Spider-Man stickers? Dude what the hell is that?

So the weather is finally better which means that disadvantaged youths are playing Basketball which means they’re raising money for their teams with peanut M&Ms. That or, disadvantaged youths are using a Basketball team as a cover for them just selling candy they got at Costco’s or BJs so they can make some money, take your pick.

I was walking around and they seriously were on the sidewalk in droves, I saw people left and right and in the subway all eating peanut M&Ms, there were probably even more than shown in this comic. The swarm of people selling the candy is only slightly exaggerated.

This happened to me this past weekend when I bought an umbrella. This is almost verbatim what the guy said to me after he sold me my umbrella. For a moment I thought he was going to give me some big secret about the umbrella, or maybe some inside knowledge that there’s a weak spot on the crappy umbrella. But no, he was just telling me how to use it like I was a two-year-old. Granted I lose my umbrella every few months or so and I always buy at the same place, but I couldn’t think of a single good practical reason this guy was lecturing me on the basic mechanics of an umbrella.