The Tablet Kid and Related and Unrelated Thoughts

The past few weeks, I’ve noticed this kid zigzagging to and fro the immediate area with a tablet in hand. I’d guess that he is a teenager—late high school or early college age. At my more advanced one, determining other people’s no longer comes easy. Anyway, the kid seemed especially interested in two nearby apartment building parking lots. He appeared to be zeroing in on the cars entering them and recording some sort of data and/or snapping pictures. As he crossed from one side of the street to another and then back again, he occasionally looked to be surveying the nearby surroundings

My initial thought was that this peripatetic young man worked for Google or some such interloping enterprise. But witnessing him—time and again—covering the same grounds and doing the same things made me reconsider. During my latest sighting, I observed the kid scurrying—upon a car’s approach to an entrance—from one parking lot to the other. This hurried act inspired me to take my Columbo raincoat out of mothballs. Perhaps this individual was a special needs kid, I posited, with a peculiar compulsion—recording makes of cars or license plates—who was presently without access to in-classroom learning. Once upon a time, I charted cars in the Bronx. If this is indeed the case, it’s sad to contemplate the many kids—particularly those with special needs—completely without or with limited access to in-person learning. Then again, this nomadic youth could be studying engineering and merely doing his homework. Whatever the case, it’s kind of unnerving watching somebody with a technological device in hand—day after day after day—behaving like a proverbial pinball on these city sidewalks, busy sidewalks.

Speaking of schooling: New York City closed its public schools today. It seems that the arbitrary citywide COVID-positive testing benchmark of 3% was reached. Doesn’t seem to matter to the powers-that-be that the in-school COVID-positive testing rate is 0.29%. In the meantime, the Big Apple’s private and charter schools remain open. The losers: kids, parents, and teachers. When the dust settles on all of this, it isn’t going to be pretty.

And now for something completely different: Somebody posted on social media this food for thought question: “Which 1970s, 80s, or 90s sitcom characters would be into QAnon today?” I encountered many interesting answers, including Kramer and Newman from Seinfeld, Wojohowitz from Barney Miller, Joey from Friends, Frank Burns from M*A*S*H, Chrissy and Ralph Furley from Three’s Company, and Schneider from One Day at a Time. Fred Sanford of Sanford and Son got a few mentions, but I would beg to differ here. Not his kind of thing. For what it’s worth, I offered up Sanford and Son as my favorite TV show in Mr. Tursi’s seventh-grade Values Clarification class. What exactly this particular line of questioning clarified remains to be seen forty-five years later.

A final note on the week leading up to Thanksgiving: Rudy, it’s really time to go into assisted living and flush the hair dye down the toilet. To quote my one-hundred-year-old aunt: “He’s not right in the head.” Speaking of which: Regarding Lou Dobbs, could it possibly be the hair dye? As for the president, if the last two weeks haven’t convinced you what the next four years could have wrought, then nothing ever will. A healthy dose of Old Joe tranquility—and a vaccine—in the near future, I believe, is just what the doctor ordered.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)