lazy sunday

this site has been light on photos lately and if you're looking for the guy to blame, frankly, it's yours truly. i am sorry. i have no excuse. an embarrassing cornucopia of walker evans moments flop into my lap daily. and what happens? i reach for my camera and ... i've left it at home. remember the recent weekend morning that was graced with full-frontal handjob action? i do, fondly. no camera. i had no means to forever preserve the moment in internet amber. oh, how mr. nice guy kicked himself over that one.

there have been more: the tot and i were recently gambolling in the lot. she climbed stairs! she slid slides! she romped right over ... to a humongous disemboweled rat! mr nice guy has seen some pretty heinous stuff in his day, but when he saw this dead thing, its belly torn open and entrails a-trailing, his gag reflex kicked into fifth gear. thankfully, i had enough presence of mind to grab the kid ... and reach for my camera -- because, of course, i had to share with you, dear readers, this image that had instantly seared itself into my cortex where it will remain until i die even if i slowly wither at the whim of some terrible degenerative alzheimer's style dementia. never will i forget the poor rat, torn open and scattered around the playground at dawn! never will i forgive myself for having forgotten my camera at home.

photographic gold was to be had at the double d pool! no camera. there was also once a lone stranger standing in the middle of the playground, staring off into space and not moving or blinking, for more than an hour. too creepy for words. he needed his picture taken. alas, no camera.

so i vowed, dear readers, to never let you down again. NEVER AGAIN shall i leave the house without a camera! today, by all accounts an average lazy sunday morning, mrs nice guy and i took the child for a stroll. we left the house fairly late ... 8 AM it was. still, the neighborhood was a veritable ghost-town. it was gorgeous out and not a soul was to be seen. but, oh, readers, you should be glad i brought my camera with me on this of all days, for i was instantly rewarded! we walked to our local coffeeshop. we walked by a trashcan on our way there. something pink and lurid caught my eye. i looked down. i saw this:

sorry, can't make out what that is? need a little help? here, i brought my camera, so i can zoom on in for you:


oh yes. oh yes indeed. someone had purchased themselves a "realistic cock" in the wee-est hours of sunday morning. they purchased this realistic cock, presumably, at the (actually pretty tame) sex shop down the street -- strategically located facing a middle school -- and this eager consumer couldn't get it out of the box fast enough. it was ripped open with a quickness! must ... access ... realistic cock! NOW! ... wait a second. do my eyes fail me or is that a discarded bottle of some sort of lotion underneath the cockbox? ah, who cares!? the important point is that i had remembered my camera! suddenly understanding how this guy felt, i took the photo!

i really want to know: on what planet is that 14-inch schlongwurst considered "realistic." i mean that giant rubber nutsack alone is as big as my baby's head -- complete with suction cup, in case, i guess, its operator needs to keep his/her hands free. (no wonder, indeed, it's "the most popular cock around" ... if the box is to be believed, anyway.) mrs nice guy looked at me, accusingly, with tear-streaked cheeks, and said: "all this time and now, NOW you mean to tell me that's what it's supposed to look like? ... you're fired."

so, fine. whatever. but how awesome is this? we get to the playground and what's the first thing we see? presto:

ha! ok enough with the juvenile silliness. i have very important business to move onto. a dear friend of mrs nice guy's wanted to go to the bronx zoo with our respective daughters today, so ... today we reserved ourselves a zipcar! just $100 for the whole day! this morning we got a call from this friend (who is having very real personal travails, so she is fully within her rights here) and she said, basically, "let's skip the zoo and just hang out in your hood." fine. fine. had a car reserved and now it's too late to cancel, but ... fine. no worries. just $100 to hang out in the playground like we do every day. cool. fine. great. happy.

mrs nice guy and her friend and the daughters hung out at the playground and did mom things and talked girlfriend talk while i diligently picked up the $100 zipcar that we were suddenly not going to drive anywhere anyway. the ladies hung out until about 2, when mrs nice guy's friend took her leave. when she left i looked at mrs nice guy and said: we have a car for 4 more hours. the baby will need to sleep for at least one of those hours. when she wakes up, we are going to difara's pizzeria.

what's that? you don't know what difara's is? oh. poor impoverished people. difara's is a one-man institution, deep in the deepest deep bowels of brooklyn, that happens to serve the Best Pizza in New York ... which means it's the Best Pizza in the World. the problem, of course, is that it's deep in the deepest deep bowels of brooklyn. so the carless mortals that comprise most of the five boroughs who occasionally make it out to grimaldi's tell themselves that they've had the greatest pizza in new york (because it's "#1 in Zagat's" for like "98 years running," wah wah wah!). but they're lying to themselves and they know it. close, but no calzone.

so when the baby woke from her nap, we scooped her up, plopped her into the carseat, which we own for some reason that is unclear to me, and we drove to difara's pizzeria. and because i brought the camera, i can show you, here, the man himself, dominick demarca. this guy, whose name apparently isn't difara, has single-handedly crafted each and every pie to come out of his oven every day for the past 637 years. this is him in painfully-slow action -- in fact it's practically a real-time video of him making the pie:

and here's the pie. if you just ate your monitor while this picture was on it, it would STILL be the best pizza you've ever eaten:

look at that! the buffalo mozz! the fresh store-grown basil! the pooling of the grease! i truly feel bad for my daughter -- the first two pizzas she's ever tasted have been from grimaldi's and now difara's. such high standards she must have! she'll never be able to stomach the sludge-covered cardboard most of the masses happily suck down. poor thing, pizza-spoiled already.

anyway, ultimately that's her problem. the pie was $20. with the zipcar it came to about $127. a small price to pay for the best pizza in the world.