No one was hurt but a lot of people were shaken up by a series of explosions on Broadway near 31st Street in Astoria yesterday. I heard one explosion from about 2 blocks away and even from that distance it shook my innards. The next one came when I was just across the street. The closer proximity made the force feel gut-crunching. Someone nearby who seemed to know what he was talking about said it was a couple of transformer explosions in the people holes. He shrugged it off.<\/p>\n
As if this wasn’t unsettling enough I later had a strange encounter with a man who walked right up to me and, with a perfectly placid and serene expression on his face, looked me in the eye and said “Yo, buddy. When you call me names it really hurts my feelings.”<\/p>\n
I had never seen this person before, and said nothing in response to his incongruous accusation. I don’t think I even adjusted my gait, just kept moving as if no words were spoken. He continued yelling after me as I walked on, I never turning back. All I could make of what he said as I walked on was “Yo, buddy.” He may have been addressing someone else by then but his voice was raised to near screaming so I interpreted it as him yelling after me.<\/p>\n
I hope he is not going to be a new fixture in Astoria. I did look him back in the eye as he approached because at first I assumed he was going to ask me for directions or something. He looked that normal. But then he said those few words and instantly became something else to me.<\/p>\n
Maybe it was some kind of joke. He had his phone held up such that he could have been recording this, documenting my reaction, or rather what I felt was a successful non-reaction. Does he stroll about town collecting reactions to inane statements like the one delivered to me?<\/p>\n
I don’t know but between that and the streets exploding I think I’ll just stay indoors for a while. Not that I’m necessarily safe from perils here. Those explosions yesterday caused some people to get evacuated from their apartments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
No one was hurt but a lot of people were shaken up by a series of explosions on Broadway near 31st Street in Astoria yesterday. I heard one explosion from about 2 blocks away and even from that distance it shook my innards. The next one came when I was just across the street. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-181-2","category-aslic","category-video","et_post_format-et-post-format-video","et-has-post-format-content"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-74i","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27174"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27175,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27174\/revisions\/27175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}