For the past six days I’ve been adventuring in New York City.  I am working on developing the Shitty Planet series of travel guides for miserable people.  Here is a two part selection from the New York Edition.

The Miserable Traveler’s Guide to New York City

America is home to some of the shittiest places on earth, but perhaps none so shitty as New York City (also known as the “Big Shit-smeared Apple”).  This sprawling metropolis on America’s eastern seaboard has it all: filth, poverty, crowds, and a gloriously rusting, 122 year-old woman who watches over it all (Barbara Walters).  For centuries Americans and foreigners have been drawn to the city like pilgrims, chasing some mysterious, ineffable “New York” quality, which is most likely the smell that comes out of the Times Square subway stop.  Now you, too, can experience the confusion and terror that is New York City.

Times Square

Times Square is very much like the sun: extremely bright, and a shitty place to spend even a few minutes if you value your health.  Vast crowds trample the elderly to death so often in Times Square that when it happens the taxi drivers don’t even stop crashing into things and maiming people long enough to dial 911.  On December 31st each year, over 500,000 assholes cram into Times Square to annoyingly ring in the new year.  In fact so many of America’s douchebags come together in Times Square at this time that scientists estimate if an atomic bomb were to go off nobody would really care.  Even when it’s not New Years, you can find anything you could possibly desire in this swarming nexus of commerce and light—provided that what you desire is a bootleg copy of Twilight, a four dollar hot dog and the feeling that if America lasts another 40 years it will be due purely to luck: blind deaf and dumb luck.

Food Carts

New York City boasts an astonishing variety of food carts, from Vietnamese “Banh” sandwiches, to Lebanese kebabs and Italian sausages.  The only thing these dirt cheap eateries have in common is that they will all give you terrible—perhaps even life-threatening—diarrhea.  If you feel a rumbling in your stomach after downing a rancid falafel, your best bet is to look for one of the carts that specialize in pumping your stomach of the poisonous food all the other carts sell (They’re usually run by Nepalese.  Nice people, those Nepalese.)  A good rule of thumb to follow in judging how safe it is to eat food from a cart in New York is:  If it looks like it could ever have possibly touched human feces, it probably has.

The Museum of Modern Art

Who doesn’t hate modern art?  There’s something universally irritating about people paying millions of dollars for a weird thing that a five year-old could have accidentally made in between picking his nose and harassing the family cat with a laser pointer.  The “MOMA” (as it’s inexplicably called—fucking art people, right?) has assembled a vast collection of modern “art” including: Art Zuckerman’s famous “Five piles of sticks” (the trick is: it’s only four piles!); an upside down blow dryer; a right-side-up blow dryer; a toilet; a sink; floors; walls; a stuffed shark; a living child forever trapped inside a glass cube; a glass cube forever trapped inside a living child; this blog post; a truly subversive painting titled: “This is Not Art”; an even more subversive painting right next to that painting titled “← I’m with art”; and some other annoying shit (literally, they have a sculpture that is just a piece of poop connected to a speaker and programmed via sensors to insult passersby).

STAY TUNED FOR PART TWO: Brooklyn, Subways, Harlem, Central Park, New York Apartments, and Other things

(See also: selections from Shitty Planet: Puerto Rico and Shitty Planet: San Francisco)