561's and Heartbreak

A word play on Kanye's new album "808's and Heartbreak". You know, 561, being the Palm Beach area code. Get it? Jeez.

I see hawks circling The Breakers right now, which means they either are about to chow down on the scraps of a ridiculously overpriced lunch, or they can read the New York Times. I’m at the epicenter of this Bernie Madoff scandal, sunny Palm Beach. If you ever wanted to hear some grown up people use some grown up language, just take a walk down the street or go into a restaurant and ask someone about Bernie Madoff. I’m out by the pool listening to Gucci Mane’s Hard To Kill, and ol’ Gucci uses some strong words, but you bring in someone’s Grandma who just got hoodwinked by Mr. Madoff, and I feel like you’ll hear some Yiddish mixed in with some Hotlanta hoodrat slang that would even have our friend Gucci Mane heading for the hills with his tail between his legs. And I don’t mean to sound flippant about this but, “what about the children?”, not the trustafarians, but all the kids that were helped by the charitable donations Mr. Madoff’s clients made. Not cool, Bernie. Not cool. You open today’s NYTimes and you see this crook walking around Manhattan with his Barbour coat on mugging for the camera and it’s sick. Apparently he’s under house arrest from 7pm to 9am. Poor baby. Between HBO onDemand, the Nintendo Wii, and SeamlessWeb, this guy’s probably having more fun while under house arrest than he was before he was under house arrest. Does The Law think they are preventing an old man/crook from going to One Oak and getting bottle service? I’ve lived in New York in the Winter, and during those rough January nights I basically put myself on house arrest. Baby, it’s cold outside.

But on a lighter and more awesome note, I am on hiatus from eating like a college kid right now. Food, and I mean real food, tastes delicious as hell. My tastebuds are like, Anise!?, Paprika!?, Keylime!?. Sweet culinary relief. To open the freezer and see ice cream sandwiches is a beautiful thing. I just don’t buy that stuff for myself, ever. What would I do for a Klondike bar? Apparently the answer is to get on a plane and head to Florida.

This time of the year all the grandkids come down to Florida and everyone wears their pastels, khakis, and loafers sans socks and generally looks pretty. I went to a new bar by myself the other night to have a beer and watch some sports. Next to me were two guys, probably late 20s, early 30s, with some very very attractive blonde girls who looked like they were the spawn of Lily Pulitzer and Paul Newman. For my own sanity I’m going to assume they were absolute bitches with bad values (even though they probably were not). And the reason I say this is because they were hanging out with these two guys, Piper and Blakeley, who seemed like they’d rank kind of high on the jerk scale. Again, judging books by covers. Judging books by covers. Ok, so maybe I was just a little jealous. Why can’t my name be Piper, damn it, or at the very least something cool like Barkevious Mingo. And if you think I’ve got the Tom Wolfe-ian skills to make up names like that, I swear to you, on the 6-month CD with 4% return I just opened, that those names are for real. See, a 4% return…not good, not bad, but a good chance that in 6 months I won’t want to call Citibank a motherfucking schmendrik and punch it in the face.