August 14, 2012
As backwards as this will sound, I interrupt the summer series of Tuesday reruns to post a new blog. This is the first of a trio of blogs that describe the typically atypical things that I have experienced recently right here in my own neighborhood. Today, Dyker Heights.
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Just last week, Saarah and I (and don’t all these stories involve her? She’s the best) decided to go out for ices. It was around 10:00 on a weeknight. Now where I live, there are plenty of places to go for ices, from pizzerias to bakeries, but we wanted to go a store that specialized in ices and had a great selection of flavors.
We had been there before. The last time there were three girls in small shop, all around 18 or so, and while we were getting our ices Saarah and I got to listen to their amazing discussion, mostly about one of them who lives almost in another borough and commutes by public transportation to work in the ices shop. Why did she come so far to work for minimum wage in a seasonal job? That was never explained and before I got a chance to get all nosey and ask they gave us our ices and we left.
The place is on the edge of a residential area on a major street so it was pretty quiet that night. We parked about two blocks away and, bearing in mind that I had just torn a muscle in my leg a couple of days earlier, we had a very slow walk to the shop. But we were making our way there when we saw some flashing lights down the street and heard some recorded announcement that we couldn’t really make out.
I turned back to look and it seemed to me that maybe it was some election and the announcement was screaming to vote for someone or other in whatever local election was soon to come.
That wasn’t it. As the vehicles drew closer, we saw that the lights and sound were coming from a police car. There was some sort of large truck immediately behind it. And the announcement?
“The City of New York is spraying pesticides to kill mosquitoes to stop the spread of West Nile Virus. Get inside IMMEDIATELY.”
Saarah looked at me.
I looked at her.
We looked at the approaching truck.
We looked around at all the private homes with their locked doors and no lights and no place we could possibly get inside.
Then the truck came and sprayed a huge and smelly cloud of pesticides in the air not six feet above our heads.
What could we do? We resumed walking to the ices shop, convinced that we were dosed with a fatal amount of pesticides. Saarah has stopped eating McDonald’s French fries because of the pesticides they use on the potatoes, so the irony is obvious.
She immediately got a headache.
Thanks to the City of New York, who gave us about 30 seconds warning to get to cover, I may now have an army of poisonous chemicals working its way through my system.
But on the plus side, I do not have West Nile Virus.
30 seconds. Didn’t the British get more warning during the Blitz when an air raid was on the way?
Thanks New York.
Luckily, Vulcans are immune to both Terran pesticides and West Nile Virus.
Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride 
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