Upstate, or Concerto Grosso in A Flat, not by George Frederick Handel

Upstate. What is Upstate? Why is Upstate such an important concept for those of us who live here in the Vampire State? And, most importantly, where is Upstate?  This last is a very important question, as many people in the Vampire State would rather have a body part removed without the benefit of anesthesia then have anyone they know think that they live or know anyone Upstate, and there are others who think wistfully that maybe they would be better off if somehow or other they could just get out of the New York City rat race and move Upstate, where the grass is always greener and the picket fences are always whiter and life is just easier somehow.  Sometimes, the same person can have both of these ideas about Upstate on the same day, but not usually at the same time. An event that cognitively dissonant will often cause apoplexy in laboratory rats, although whether it would have the same result with New Yorkers is unknown. Ingesting large amounts of caffeine is supposed to protect against such things, and if there is anything New Yorkers do better than almost anyone else is ingest caffeine. All right, maybe people in Seattle ingest more caffeine on a per capita basis, but there is no Upstate in Washington, so they’re not probably not the best people to ask about something like this.

Before we start defining Upstate, let’s define what Upstate isn’t.  The people in Buffalo, for example, do not consider themselves Upstaters; they live in Western New York, thank you very much, and they will have nothing to do with a faux geographical controversy that takes time away from them stuffing their pie-holes with spicy chicken wings at every opportunity. Similarly, the people of the Southern Tier don’t really consider themselves Upstaters either, given that they aren’t upstate from anything; you can’t really be an Upstater if the downstate involved is Pennsylvania. On the other hand, the people in Malone do consider themselves Upstaters, a choice forced on them by geography; you can’t go any further upstate than Malone without actually being in Canada.  People who live in Lawn Guyland are definitely not Upstaters and whether or not Westchester County is Upstate seems to be a matter of some debate, especially if you live in New York City; for Upstaters, on the other hand, Westchester and most of Rockland County are Downstate. Given that no one seems to know just where Upstate is, what is this upstate place that you hear New Yorkers go on and on about?

First, you must remember that Upstate is a state of mind. If you live in Greenwich Village, then everything above Fourteenth Street is Upstate. If you live on 125^th Street, then the Bronx is probably Upstate, even if your cousin Rosie lives there. Your cousin Rosie, of course, will argue that no way does she live Upstate and the people on the Upper West Side would probably agree with her; living in the Bronx makes you one of the bridge and tunnel crowd, which is the New York equivalent of the flyover people the coastal elites in this country don’t like to think about. Your cousin will think that the people in Westchester are upstate, largely because they don’t live in New York City, an entity that includes all of the five boroughs, as opposed to The City, which everyone knows means Manhattan. If you don’t know that The City means Manhattan, then very clearly you are from somewhere not only west of the Hudson River, but west of New Jersey as well, if such a thing is possible. But your cousin Rosie would be wrong about Westchester. The people there consider themselves Downstaters; Westchester and most of Rockland County are the city’s suburbs, filled with people who come from New York City and / or work in New York City and therefore cannot believe that they could be Upstaters themselves, not after spending their lives hearing that the people Upstate routinely hunt deer and rub deer dung on themselves to make it easier for them to hunt deer. They are commuters, after all, and not at all the sort of people who would gun down Bambi without so much as a second thought, even if Bambi is eating their hedges and their flower gardens and defecating all over their front lawns while knocking over their garbage cans. You know you’re an Upstater when you regard Bambi and his friends as a bunch of oversized hoofed rats and you have the will and the means [i.e. at least two hunting rifles, one for you and the other for the missus, or one carbon fiber hunting bow] of turning Bambi and his friends into venison meatballs, which are delicious with your spaghetti and a nice home-made tomato sauce. Yes they are.

After many a long year trying to figure this stuff out, the consensus of opinion among moderate people of all races and creeds hereabouts is that Upstate either begins north of Interstate 84 or north of Poughkeepsie and that we should all learn to live together despite where we believe Upstate begins. Unfortunately, the debate between the fanatical adherents of each point of view tends to be loud and vicious in the extreme, with the Dutchess County Sheriff’s Office and the New York State Police often called in to quell the violence with truncheons, water cannon, and tear gas. The conflict arises because Poughkeepsie and the other towns along the river have many people who work in The City and so don’t really think of themselves as Upstaters, whereas almost everyone who doesn’t work in The City thinks of themselves as Upstaters. This is a very tricky situation for our local political class; they don’t want to alienate the commuter vote, who tend to have some money in their pockets, but on the other hand do not want to alienate the non-commuter population because they know that no Upstate politician has ever lost an election by running against The City. This is because all true Upstaters believe, in their heart of hearts, that New York State would be a much better place if someone in Albany could just figure out how to get rid of The City altogether.  This is economic nonsense, of course; the state would collapse completely without The City to prop up its finances; but many people believe economic nonsense; how do you explain the persistence of Marxism otherwise?

For my part, I think Upstate starts north of Poughkeepsie. I believe this for a number of reasons, none of which makes sense to the I-84 believers. First, the people in southern Dutchess County watch the New York City television stations. We are familiar with what goes on in The City whether we want to be or not. Second, Poughkeepsie is the northernmost station on the Hudson Line; if you want to go further north than Poughkeepsie, you have to take Amtrak. Third, the increasing suburbanization of southern Dutchess tells me that this area will be as firmly Downstate as Rockland County in a few years and we all may as well face that reality now. The idea will stick in the collective craw for a long while, no two ways about it, but some things, like death and sweaty underwear, are inevitable whether you like them or not. And so it goes.

WILDLIFE: Squirrels, I think we can all agree, are cheerful little rodents, despite their somewhat untoward personal habits, such as associating with a moronic moose, eating through power lines during the World Series, and dropping dead in inconvenient places. They do not, it seems, time their collective demises to cause the maximum amount of hullabaloo, unlike, for example, the three toed sloth, a species known for rousing itself vigorously from its usual torpor when in extremis, the better to crash elegant dinner parties, where the afflicted sloth will expire in a loud and grotesque manner on the dining room floor between the soup and the main course. So common, and so incredibly annoying, is this slothful behavior that many caterers in South American countries employ platoons of heavily armed guards and deploy them around the mansions of the local elites with orders to shoot any terminal sloth in the neighborhood on sight in order to keep the beast from upsetting the guests. Squirrels, being, in the main, a fairly polite species as rodents go, would just as soon not annoy anyone with their passing. However, this deep modesty on their parts has the unfortunate effect of making squirrels cringe at the very thought of going to a doctor when they are not feeling well and leads them to delay medical assistance until there is nothing veterinary science can do for them. This leads inexorably to squirrels dropping dead in the most unexpected places at the most equally unexpected times.

I bring this bit of squirrel-like (my apologies for not looking up a suitably Latinate word for squirrelly behavior; it has been a long day) trivia to your attention because for the past few days I and everyone else who labors in the egregious mold pit have had to endure an olfactory assault of almost unprecedented ferocity, said assault led by a squirrel who chose to become an ex-squirrel somewhere near this mycological breeding grounds’ heating and air conditioning units, causing all who enter this place to stop for a moment as they pass through the front door and say, “What the hell is that disgusting stench?!” Given that I have just survived attempts by my respiratory and digestive (unless the gall bladder is in some other system, preferably in a star system far, far away annoying Darth Vader instead of me) systems to kill me, the last thing I need at this point is to spend all day long smelling a damn squirrel that ran face first into the fate I somehow managed to avoid. I’m still feeling a bit under the weather, but the prognosis is excellent, thank you very much. On the other hand, Christmas, and with it the relatives, is coming; things will be getting worse before they start getting any better. You can bet the ranch on that one, boys and girls.

In any case, and here we are about to do a major zig along with a minor zag with a permission slip from its parents subject wise—I really don’t feel like complaining about the squirrel now; just thinking about it is hurting my still sore nasal passages—and talk about deer, which stink even worse than squirrels do when deceased but have the good sense not to drop dead on this dump’s roof. The Vampire State, which, as you may know, is a longtime protection racket prevalent in the northeastern section of this our Great Republic, has somehow managed to count the entire population of deer residing within the state borders. Some 840,000 deer live here, which is more deer than I believe there are people in Montana, penguins in Monaco, or Hasidic porn stars in Manhattan Beach. Indeed, there are so many deer here that if the state legislature, as wise and distinguished a mob of two bit peculating malfeasant goniffs who ever got caught with both hands grabbing away in the public till, chose to extend the franchise to them, this state would rate another vote in the Electoral College.

I do not think we have to worry about the legislature pandering for the ungulate vote as yet, but if Caligula could make his horse a senator then there’s no telling what those clowns would do if they thought no one was watching. The deer vote should be fairly easy to come by, I think—as far as I can tell, the only thing that deer want from this state’s political classes is the right to eat my mother’s shrubbery at all hours of the day and night and to crap all over my lawn whenever they feel like it. I appreciate—don’t think for a second that I don’t—the fact that I haven’t had to put store-bought fertilizer on my lawn for I don’t know how many years now, but I would like to walk from one end of my driveway to the other without having to think long and hard about the driveway’s extreme lack of traction.

Still, what really intrigues me here is the number itself: 840,000. I know that round numbers are, in and of themselves, inherently unbelievable, but the idea that the Vampire State could even semi-accurately count the number of deer resident here when it doesn’t know how much money it has (allegedly) stashed in the state treasury strains, and strains well past credulity, the psychic breaking point of all but the most moronic of the citizenry. If this is the state’s number, then in all likelihood the real population is anywhere between three and five times higher than this. You will, no doubt, scoff at this and ask how this could be so, and if I lived someplace else, I might agree with you. But I don’t live somewhere else: I live here. I don’t know how they missed the extra deer—maybe the deer disguised themselves as illegal immigrants, aspiring actors, or suicidal hedge fund managers—but I know the state missed them. That’s just the way things work here. To believe otherwise would call my sanity into question, I think, and lead to other unpleasant repercussions, like becoming a hog caller or an insurance salesman, a thought that sends chills down my spine and a prospect I am sure you find frightening as well.

FURTHER ADVENTURES OF BAMBI: You may find this hard to believe—I know I was stunned and amazed when I first heard it—but the vast majority of bald eagles do not know any of the words to The Star-Spangled Banner. That’s a solid gold fact. In addition to this, most bald eagles do not spend a lot of time thinking about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, unless happiness is a species of fish, have no clue what the Constitution is all about, and are reasonably certain that Lincoln’s Gettysburg address refers to someone’s summer home or maybe an automobile dealership; most bald eagles have never even heard of the American Civil War. This, however stunning you may find these revelations, is nothing less than the plain unvarnished truth of the matter. Your average bald eagle knows as much about American history and government as your average American teenager, and with less excuse as well, since, unlike American teenagers, they’ve not had to endure that prolonged exercise in legally compelled ignorance known as compulsory education. When you see a bald eagle sitting in a tall tree looking proud and majestic, the one thing you can be fairly certain of is that he’s not thinking about is how he’s proud to be an American; he’s either thinking about getting something to eat or how eagle babes really dig this whole proud and majestic look he’s got going on.

This goes on all the time, of course; one culture after another picks an animal and makes the poor critter the repository of all the alleged cultural virtues, whereas the animal itself is just trying to make a living and support the wife and kids on the crummy salary national symbols get paid. This happens to birds all the time; the French cockerel, for example, does not worry all that much about projecting pride, arrogance, and that certain je ne sais quoi that makes the French French. No, he’s just trying to avoid being the coq au vin when your family comes over for Sunday night dinner and sometimes he does not succeed. Recently, Americans had had to put up with penguins marching hither and yon, like maitre de’s on parade, and some animated nonsense about penguins dancing up a storm south of the border, down Antarctica way. Now, penguins may dress better than your average bird, who, with a few exceptions, tend to dress with all the style of your sixteen-year old son going to the junior prom (ruffled pink shirts and big bowties? What the hell were we thinking?), but penguins also tend to live together in huge colonies without bathrooms, like the completely stoned inhabitants of some very bad 1960’s hippie commune—ashram—Volkswagen minibus packed with Deadheads, and feed their kids by puking half-digested fish into their mouths on a regular basis. Try doing that with your kid and the tuna sandwich you had this morning and see how fast you wind up in the slammer. Clearly, while the penguin is, no doubt, a very snappy dresser, penguins are lousy dancers and it’s pretty clearly they lack the social graces to be successful in modern American society. So, eagles are noble, doves are peaceful, swans are romantic; this sort of thing is all codswallop and balderdash, when it isn’t busy being poppycock. Birds are none of the above; they are altogether filthy creatures with quite disgusting, if not actually nauseating, personal habits, and you can bet your bottom dollar that they wouldn’t mind crapping all over your brand new shoes just for the fun of it, if you gave them half a chance. All the patriotic chest thumping about the symbolic importance of the bald eagle can’t change that one damn bit.

Other species get the same sort of treatment as well, and I blame most of this on Walt Disney. During his career, Walt probably did more to protect animals that don’t deserve protecting than anyone else in human history. Mice, whether you call them Mickey or Minnie, are not cute little adorable balls of furry fun; they are vermin. Ducks really are as vile-tempered as Donald is, so there’s a little truth in advertising there, and deer are not sweet, lovable nature’s children who only want to play and frolic in the forest primeval with their cute little furry friends without having to worry about people and their nasty firearms; deer are oversized rats with hooves. Deer don’t want to frolic in the forest primeval; they want to eat my mother’s geraniums and her shrubbery and crap all over my front yard every chance they get. So when my co-workers accused me of trying to kill Bambi the other night, my answer is a) I didn’t kill the deer, b) I wasn’t trying to kill a deer at all, it was an accident, and c) the little bastard had it coming.

The fact is all I was doing was going to get my mother some milk and eggs. I was on a back road and a car had just passed me when I saw a deer bolt across the road like he’d just heard Bugs say deer season. I jammed on the brakes, as the one thing you learn quickly about deer around here is that where you see one, you will quickly see two. In my case, there were six or seven of the despicable beasts, all charging across the road at top speed without bothering to look to see if there was any traffic coming. There was; I was it. I managed to miss deer two through six with considerable ease; number seven, on the other hand, proved a little harder to miss, given its insistence on charging right in front of me and then hurling itself up onto the hood of my car. I slammed on the brakes; it seemed the right thing to do at the time; and the sudden de-acceleration caused my somewhat unconventional passenger to go flying through the air with the greatest of ease, and to land without the slightest scintilla of acrobatic grace. He landed with a pretty loud thump. As if that were not enough, the beast then gave me a dirty look that said if he had two legs instead of four, he’d be looking for a lawyer and suing my ass off right now. Then he went charging off into the woods after his friends, and without giving me his insurance card, either, which is the sort of silly irresponsible behavior that give many deer a bad name these days, if you ask me.

I suppose things could have been worse; hitting the deer only resulted in $327.56 worth of damage to the car. While he was busy being an unwilling hood ornament, the deer managed to kick my passenger’s side mirror off its mounting and to damage the electrical system on that side of the car, too. I wasn’t hurt at all, except in the wallet, and I think the deer suffered little more than bruised ribs and injured pride; he was up and running within seconds of my hitting him; so maybe this will alert him to the dangers of running around with a fast crowd after dark. If it doesn’t, then the next time he gets in my way, see if I cut Nature Boy anymore slack; no way, Bambi—next time, you’re venison.

OH, DEER: And now, courtesy of The Smallest Minority, which, I should point out for the easily confused, is not a site for vertically challenged African Americans, Hispanics, gays, or some combination of all of the above, comes a story so damn funny, I damn near pissed my pants the first time I read it. If you are in the mood to ruin a perfectly good pair of trousers, I suggest you head on over there and read the thing for yourself.