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WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE – Nightlife Safety Tips by Jack Zero

29 Oct

In light of rising larceny and assaults where I work in the Meatpacking District, I’ve decided to throw together a few tips that may keep you and your friends safe when visiting nightclubs or other night spots.

Keep in mind that anything you read on the internet should never be taken as gospel. Always do further research, especially when it comes to your safety.

1. SURVIVING THE “WILD”

Easy one. Travel in packs. If you split up, at least keep in pairs. Predators are looking for a weak link. You should know this one already. You’re lucky there’s no lions around.

2. KEEP YOUR CLAWS OUT

When traversing the street to and from your vehicle, keep any self defense items within reach. This means checking their availability before getting out of the car, and then again before stepping out of the club. If you don’t think you can manage this due to intoxication, see tip 4.

3. CHECK THE NEST

Before leaving your vehicle behind to walk to the club, check the area for people loitering, acting suspiciously or walking without purpose. Pay attention to who is paying attention to you. If you don’t feel safe, don’t leave the vehicle.

Often either extreme is indicative of a possible predator… Either watching you too closely, or ignoring you no matter how long you look… Gauge them. Learn to trust your instincts.

4. POISON AND PREY

Barring an extreme sensitivity to alcohol, the body can process:
1oz(1 shot) of alcohol/per hr
4oz of wine/per hr
12 oz of beer/per hr

Now while this is true, I highly doubt many people will be closely regimenting their alcohol intake (with the added factor of mixing tinctures), so I just want to state it as flat as possible. If you are exceeding limits, be aware that you are basically painting a neon sign that you are an easy target.

If you find that you repeatedly go over your limit to the point of loss of control, or loss of property, you may consider designating a sober friend to accompany you. Or you can pay or bribe them. Money talks.

5. HUNGRY LIKE THE WOLF

If you absolutely, positively HAVE TO end up going home alone with a perfect stranger, PLEASE for the love of God, Poseidon, Eminem or whoever you worship… Ask the stranger to take out their wallet, get out the iPhone I know you own, and snap a pic of their state issued ID. Then send it to two friends. They had to have one to get into the club, and if they won’t let you… Well, that’s pretty suspect in itself.

6. PREY AND POISON 2

Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever,

(GASP)

ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever,

(*checks watch*)

ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever…

…EVER. For any reason. Leave your drink unattended. In a crowded club.

Come on.

7. MIND THE HYENAS

Pickpockets often work in groups. If you encounter a group of people that are being too friendly in an overcrowded club, remain cordial but make a mental note of where your things are. Keep your purse hanging high and in the front of you where you have at least a peripheral view of it.

Basically don’t have your purse anywhere someones hands might fall accidentally. That is the cover of a pickpocket. They will dance up, grind on you and take advantage of the “crowd desensitization” that occurs when stumbling senseless through a crowded group of people. You barely feel the bumps, and then someone can just reach in and grab your phone or wallet.

Realistically, the best place to keep a purse hanging is near an erogenous zone. The body is tuned to snap awake and aware when these places are touched no matter the level of crowd desensitization. Ergo, the best place is to carry the bag by the chest.

A pickpocket will more often go for a phone than a wallet. It’s easier to offload electronics than bank cards.

Also, a group of pickpockets will likely use a system, more organic and improvisational than rigid and regimented. The most common systems will have the Distraction (whoever ends up dancing with you or talking to you) and the Actor (the pickpocket). Sometimes they will even have the Shield (the one who backs up against you while you’re distracted and offers cover for the Actor to reach in your bag.) When they’ve successfully made the grab, the next inevitable step is the cold shoulder, or one of them will overtly do something scummy and drive out the plucked prey (i.e. you).

This system is definitely still in use with pickpocket groups, as I was able to use this knowledge to isolate, identify, and expel a group of pickpockets at my place of work last week. Keep in mind, the police cannot make an arrest if the victim leaves the premises or will not identify her pickpocket. The only way you get your stuff back is if you stay and follow through.

Clubs cannot search their patrons, but they can filter them in the future if you ID someone as a thief and they can track a pattern.

Also, don’t be afraid to test club security upon arrival by asking questions about how they run the club, where the coat check is, and who watches the bags. If they are vague about the answers, you may either want to keep a tighter watch on your stuff or find another night spot altogether. The more business they lose, the more they’ll be scrambling to find out how to keep you there.

Yelling and complaining WILL NOT make them hold their staff accountable IF YOU CONTINUE TO PUT MONEY IN THEIR POCKET.

8: GUARD YOUR FLANK

I don’t bare my nuts in a fight. Don’t bare your cash or electronics in a turbid environment filled with possible thieves.

When paying or counting money, look around for predators. When using your phone or securing a purse, put your back to a wall and again, take a look around.

The key here is AWARENESS.

9. SNAKE SPOTTING

Unless you’re looking for the type for your own reasons (which is a preference), a lot of clubs are teeming to the brim with sociopaths. If you’re looking to go to a club to meet someone nice and find something lasting, my first advice to you is:

No.

But, if you must, here’s a shortlist of the attributes of a sociopath:

– They have a superficial charm. They are smooth and engaging-never shy nor self-conscious.
– They have a super-inflated view of their own self-worth. They are arrogant.
– They are prone to boredom and have an excessive need for stimulation.
– They are pathological liars. They are clever and deceitful in their lies.
– They are manipulative and will defraud and cheat others for their own benefit.
– They cannot always control their behavior. They will sometimes slip and express brief moments of annoyance, anger, or abuse.
– They are sexually promiscuous and seek multiple sexual partners.
– They have no realistic, long-term goals. They lack direction.
– They are impulsive and unpredictable.
– They do not accept responsibility for their actions. There is always an excuse. ***

Obviously you can’t condemn someone for displaying one or two of these traits in a tense moment, but if you’re seeing 3 or more on a regular basis (and especially in a setting like a club, where it is pretty easy to keep ones neurosis under wraps for the few hours you’re there), you should question it.
Pay attention to how your “crush” interacts with people other than you. Remember that alcohol can impair judgement and ramps up libido. Consider your motivation. Compare what you want and what you see. Make an adult decision. If you find that you cannot, remove yourself from the situation. Rather to be indecisive and alone for the night, than… any “horror story” alternative to that.
Yeah, You only live once, but one stupid decision and you can suffer forever. And it may not just be you suffering.
Remember: If you are lonely, and you absolutely need someone, pick a person. Not someone pretending to be one.
10. EYE OF THE TIGER
Above all. AWARENESS. Train yourself to be AWARE. A good habit is formed in 21 days.
Pay attention to your surroundings in your everyday life. The people, the patterns, everything.
The night club life is the same as the everyday life. Same world. Same people. There are no “safe zones”.
There is beauty in this world, but it is not free. In order to sustain those beautiful things, we must guard ourselves and those we love.
I know it’s hard nowadays to sift through the fear mongering of articles similar to this one, but try this:
Put some time aside to think about your fears. Lay them all out on the table, write them down, and really consider what you do and don’t have control over.
After that, decide what to do if your fears come true.
Do that and you’re on the path. Follow the path and soon you’ll know more, and then your friends can learn from you and be safer. And that’s how we better this world.
And right there, you’ve taken the Initiative. That’s what we mean by Trust Yourself.
It’s already in you.

***http://voices.yahoo.com/how-identify-sociopath-1891564.html?cat=72

One Mind At A Time by Cognito Gusto

17 Sep

20120917-183223.jpgA year or so ago, I told a close friend who is in his 60s and a bit set in his ways, about my ‘extracurricular activities’. I told him for two reasons. First, he was beginning to suspect something, and second, I knew he was a fatalist about most things, and I wanted to see if I could perhaps temper than with a little bit of hope and faith in humanity.

You see, he had been telling me that “one person can’t make any difference”, that we’re all just subject to the whims of life, and it’s best to just be prepared to roll with the inevitable punches. I wanted to start a process going that would start to change all that, and it began with telling him what I really do with my time.

As expected, he laughed and told me to “have fun” but that ultimately I’d see his point.

Fast-forward two years. I’ve been regaling him with stories on almost every visit, about how we put out fires, rescue people from floods, stop and render aid, help the homeless and other groups, etc. I’ve told him about co-ordinated efforts across the country to save lives and get peple out of bad situations. I’d seen some changes in his attitude, but something that happened last week made me feel like I’d actually finally accomplished something real…

My friend, who had always been a bit of a racist, quite the hoarder, and the ultimate fatalist, loaded up his barely-used Schwinn bicycle, and set out to find a new owner for it. He drove around a while, until he saw two young black boys standing on the side of the road talking. One boy was straddling a bicycle, the other wasn’t.

My friend stopped, rolled down the window and asked if the 2nd boy had a bike. When he said no, my friend said “you do now!”, got out, and gave the boy a “new” bicycle, extra tubes, and tools to care for it. After a few minutes of reassuring them that he wan’t trying to pass them a stolen bike, the boy accepted the gift and everyone said their happy goodbyes.

When my friend told me the story, he was on the verge of tears himself! Apparently knowing that he had made a real difference in this boy’s life, and had crossed racial barriers to do so, made him feel really good and for once, hopeful. I don’t believe my friend would have ever done such a thing a year ago, but I do believe I’ll be hearing more stories like this from him in the future.

We CAN change things, even if it’s just one mind at a time.

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S.B.D. – Silent but Deadly by NightBug

3 Sep

“It’s better to remain silent and be thought a fool than open ones mouth and remove all doubt” ­­- Mark Twain (attributed)

 

 

It really isn’t that difficult to NOT appear to be a lunatic.

…that is, if you don’t take into account the choice to dress up like a comic book character and pass out sandwiches.

Anyone who knows me in person — and online, to a lesser extent — knows that I don’t tend to rant a lot. For that matter, I don’t even talk very much. I lean toward reposting what I consider to be important information and advice from others. After all, it’s been said that great artists don’t create, they steal. But it isn’t because I have nothing of my own to say.

Being married to Rock N Roll is no simple challenge. Not only is she talented and gorgeous (and susceptible to flattery!), she’s a talker by nature – and she’s exceptional at it. In her case, this inherent skill carries over to the written word as well. So, for someone like me, attempting to out-chat or -write her would be a pretty useless endeavor. Rather than waste a lot of effort proving to everyone that I’m not the “trophy husband” through my words, I’ve developed what I believe is a pretty effective filter.

Too often, members of the RLSH/X-Alt/Creative Activist community just don’t understand discretion. We are supposed to serve as examples to others, to inspire them to do better. A HUGE part of this is knowing when to speak up and when to keep quiet. If Spider-Man were real, I seriously doubt I’d be interested in reading about his lack of money or his pathetic social life (before he married Mary Jane Watson, anyway). There’s just such a fine line between walking the path of the hero and letting people know that you’re not any different from anyone else — and this line is consistently blurred, broken, and walked all over by community members who don’t realize (or care) they are doing it.

It’s been said over and over that “Facebook is not real life,” but in too many ways, it is real life, and even more so. Because we are typing thoughts and feelings into our own personal computers or mobile devices, many of us are more apt to bring up things that we wouldn’t normally discuss face-to-face.

Things we couldn’t discuss face-to-face.

Things… we shouldn’t discuss face-to-face.

Seriously, it’s really a pretty easy thing to re-read what you’re about to post BEFORE hitting the “return” key. Just ask yourself, “If this were a post from someone who I look to for inspiration, would I actually want to read it?” The term “lurker” is often synonymous with “stalker,” but rule 33 of the Internet is to “lurk moar.” If you don’t know how to act, then hang out and pay attention to other reasonable community members before writing a pointless or depressing status update or a lengthy, overly-specific diatribe on something that no one else is going to care about (or even bother to read).

Work on your filter. Consider the necessity of your post before it goes up.

And for Thanatos’ sake, please use line breaks. They are your friends.

NightBug is one half of the dynamic founding duo behind the California Initiative (CAI), is a rabid fan of Star Wars, Spider-Man, and his iPhone 4.

He is also paid one million dollars for his services and does not love any of you.

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The Women In My Life by Zero

16 Apr


Let me tell you a story about the glue of my universe.

I started out young with not much guidance, surprise, surprise. My parents were the type of people that had little chance to have a childhood of their own, both sides having five or more siblings, so they were constantly trying to reclaim that part of their lives. And then of course, they had children while still kids themselves… Same old story. We are forever playing out these cycles, old as time itself.

My mother wasn’t present for most of my life, which left me in a place of having no strong female role model for quite some time. I don’t know if any of you have experience with that, but for a boy raised by a father from a rough family, it’s like this:

You kind of sink into the life of an animal, not much warmth, not much compassion. You’re tossed into a world of floating on the surface, very little introspection. Little to no chance of any kind of real meaningful growth that you can share with a father that is trying to pull double duty and is stretched so thin that there’s not enough left to cover everything.

But people are people, and he did the best he could. He’s my Pop, what can I say. Time passes, we see things for what they really are. What they really were.

One of the things he did right was the type of women that he brought into my life. From a young age, after my parents divorced, he lived with a woman that we’ll call Debra. For all intents and purposes, Debra was my real mother after my birth mother disappeared on me.

Debra was strong willed and loudly opinionated, which worked well for me because I was what my father liked to call a “selective listener”, which of course means that I would hear perfectly when dinner was ready but I would somehow miss the lecture about not playing with fire behind the shed, and not throwing knives at my bedroom door.

She had excellent values, and a way of saying things so that they stuck. One of the things she taught me was to always be myself. This may sound cliche, and simple to some, but to a young kid, that’s an invaluable lesson. To some, that’s the moment that your life changes, when someone believes in you enough to tell you to be who you are.

She said to me, “You be yourself, because if you’re not you, who are you?”

Really, all the lessons and philosophies we explore later in life must truly have their genesis in this simple sentiment. I never forgot it, and it’s one of the reasons I am who I am today.

But it doesn’t end there.

My Pop later ended up with a lady we’ll call Susan. Susan might have been the polar opposite of Debra in that she was soft spoken, well-read and generally had a different upbringing than anyone we’d had contact with up until that point.

She brought and still brings a grace to my father that I never knew existed in him, and in the way he has grown and progressed, he has redeemed himself. He is truly a different man than his days of drinking and brawling. We are both different for her.

She was really the first person to make me focus on my art, after years of being shamed and seen as an outcast in my family for my eccentricities. She essentially taught me the same lesson that Debra did, only in a more evolved way due to my age. She convinced me, against all my wishes, to go to art school after barely graduating from, basically, a prison/youth detention school of only 15-20 students, each and every student with histories of serious criminal activity.

Before her, my future was no doubt either prison or the grave with the way I was leading my life. I entered college. I excelled in college. And I finished college. My victories in that area will always remain hers as well as mine.

Be that as it may, we all eventually run out of steam and will if we’re not living right. Years piled on, doubts set in, and even my early years working as a vigilante and my “problem solver” business just weren’t right. They didn’t sit right, and as time passed my darkness was something I thought I needed, despite all these lessons. I stopped listening, I’d heard everything.

Or so I thought.

I met Chesi in my 9th year of work as Z, and in my first year of organizing the New York Initiative with the other Founding Four. Before her, compassion was an afterthought, something to explore for later.

Chesi taught me that now IS later. She taught me that time does not move as linearly as we think, and the present moment isn’t about living in some past pain or future worry. It’s about setting an intention and allowing yourself to stay in the now, to explore every moment and truly be human.

She is the most compassionate person I have ever met. She stepped into my strange life and just by being herself, gave me hope for humanity. She made a circuit of the lessons I learned from Debra and Susan, reigniting them in me.

And it’s in that way that she has influenced the people I allow myself to work side by side, my true brothers and sisters of the Initiative. They may not be blood, but we are united in thought and action. In a world like this, how you get there isn’t always where you end up.

It’s in my greatest moments of doubt that I sit quietly, and replay all the wise words of these rare people. Those words that built me, and the lessons that still hold me together.

If we change the world, if we ever make a dent, you thank THEM. Not me.

*Salute*.

-

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All Hail The Eye! by The Baroness

19 Oct

A featured post from one of our readers-

I am the Baroness, agent of the Roaming Eye of Doom. The EYE is comprised of a group of like minded individuals bent on world domination. While we do believe that the idea behind the community is noble, the actions of few reflect poorly on the entirety. We here at Station 19, decided it was time to make a difference. Observe and report. There is power in laughter and thus our method was adopted.

My mission is to call attention to the “heroes” who act in ways unbecoming of a hero. I feel like if you are going to give yourself that title, you better act accordingly. Unfortunately it seems that the majority of the men and women calling themselves “heroes” are untrained, egotistical, fan boys. There are multiple problems with this.

The first being the most obvious, someone is going to get hurt. There has recently been some events that have been huge in the media with “heroes” acting before they think. This was an interesting case because it was caught on tape, but really how often do you think this happens? My concern here is not only for innocent people on the street being accosted with mace and other home made weapons, but also the “heroes” themselves. I am a woman and if someone in a costume and mask came at me in any way, even if its to help, I would panic. I would instinctively act to protect myself against the imposing threat, and I am not alone. The situation could be easily escalated. Now this wouldn’t be a concern if there was some sort of training required, some sort of leadership, and regulations. Unfortunately, there is not.

The thing that sets us apart from other villains and groups is the fact that we don’t hate just for the sake of hating. We do not loathe all heroes, just the ones that bring it on themselves. I also believe that the medicine is always easier to swallow with a little sugar. We try to satirize our commentary to show just how ridiculous this is all becoming. Our message is clear. We are a direct response to the absurd antics of the “hero” community at large.

We enjoy the opportunity to indulge negative aspects of our personalities as well – teasing, mocking, tormenting – all things we love to do to those who ask for it. We don’t make unfair statements. We don’t out peoples’ other identities. We don’t low blow. We speak the truth and simply verbalize what everyone else is thinking. Sometimes we are ironic, and…. We make people laugh. Whats not to love?

Meet your opportunity to contribute.

12 Sep

This column is reserved for you, our readers. We’re looking for a few good women (or men) who have something useful to impart to our readers. Would you like to submit an article? Please click on our “contributing articles” link for details.

Happy writing!

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