IMAGINARY 'OVERHEARD MOMENTS' IN NEW YORK THIS MONTH: WHAT THEY MIGHT HAVE SAID TO EACH OTHER HAD I BEEN THERE AT THE TIME TO DISCREETLY EAVESDROP

 ---"I'm so glad I don't work for a dating service during this pandemic. Most single persons won't be happy with virtual dates, but that's all I could ethically offer them if I worked for a dating service here in Manhattan. They could look at images of each other on their cell phones while having a friendly conversation."

--"As a therapist, a lot of my virtual-clients here tell me they fell in love with their doctor or nurse during their stay in the hospital. They fell in love because they got out of the hospital alive, so they figure their doctor or nurse was a good luck charm for them for the rest of their lives. I have to explain to my clients that it was a professional relationship with that doctor or nurse, NOT a personal relationship. The chances of their crossing the altar with their doctor or nurse are one in a million, I would say. And besides, many of those doctors and nurses they saw in the hospital are already married to someone. This is the kind of reality my clients are often wildly out of touch with."

--"This pandemic has completely changed my outlook toward human saliva. I wish I could find a book that offers nothing but good things to say about human saliva, this might cheer me up a bit. What role does saliva play, other than to spread fatal diseases? This is what I seem to forget these days. I would prefer a photo-illustrated book that conveys and promotes each of the healthy roles that human saliva can offer us."

--"I try to stay away from all of my most neurotic friends these days. I would find it unbearably stressful to hear them tell me on the telephone that they had a possibly fatal moment on the subway when a guy near them suddenly sneezed so dramatically that his face mask fell off in the middle of it. New Yorkers tend to be very dramatic in their sneezing practices, from what I've seen---probably the southern Italian influence here. I have never heard of a southern Italian who can sneeze with subtlety."

---"At least no one is accusing me of being inhospitable these days. I was somewhat notorious before COVID 19 because I hosted only one social party per year. Everyone said I was very stingy that way. Now I host zero parties per year, and everyone is happy with me."

--"I need to talk with friends of mine who hosted a virtual party and had a lot of fun with it. I like the idea of offering virtual hors d'oeuvres, since I don't have to spend as much time in the kitchen when I prepare a virtual hors d'oeuvre for my virtual party guests. They all tell me they had a virtually good time, and after the party there is no mess to clean up."

---"What I need is a poster I can display in my living room that ranks each of the vegetables and fruits for their health benefit levels. Broccoli is right up there; I just need a power-ranking of each of the other lifesaver vegetables and lifesaver fruits, as I call them. My thinking is that if I can survive this pandemic with help from that poster on my wall, I will also have 10 additional years of longevity I can devote to being a paid consultant to businesses. I haven't figured out yet what they'd consult me about, so I need to identify my expertise area and market myself ferociously as an expert in that field."

---"I was invited to a virtual funeral the other day, and I attended but with reservations. I felt awkward sitting in my living room while crying for the honored corpse I saw on my computer screen. There was no sense of true commiseration, since I was crying all alone in my apartment."

---"Maybe I should pay a consultant to help me identify the one place in the entire world that statistically is least likely to be struck by a pandemic. I will then make a point of buying a second home there, so I can evacuate to my second home far away whenever New York has its next pandemic."

---"I have spent much of this pandemic trying to talk my relatives into quitting smoking, with zero success at it. Everyone resents it when I bring the subject up, they say it just increases their stress level so they respond by lighting up a cigarette."

--"I need to get a statistic on the percentage of those who died from COVID-19 who are smokers. That statistic would be great publicity for the American Cancer Society and our annual fund drives. That may sound callous of me to say, but I recognize the strategic benefit to the American Cancer Society from publicizing that type of statistic."

---"I get very tired of telling everyone that I am grateful to be alive. I hope I can do better than to offer that as my daily declaration. It sounds brain-dead to say that over and over again. What about this: 'I am grateful to have invented a labor-saving device that I hope to get patented soon so I can retire to Tahiti'. Wouldn't that be a more interesting thing to say than 'I'm grateful to be alive'? 

---"I'm probably the only person I know of who has never been asked for an interview by either The Times, The Post, OR the Daily News. My consolation is that I've succeeded so well at what I'm doing that there's no need for a headline to announce that success of mine to the entire world. True, I probably would get some phone call invitations to meet someone for lunch if they read about me in one of our three major papers. But it's probably just as well that my face is not plastered all over our newspapers. It might be a security risk for me if there were photos of mine in the media. Some reader with a criminal record might envy my success and try to kidnap me and demand a ransom."

--"I wish there were a medical clinic that offers to clear my lungs for a reasonable fee. Since I'm a smoker, I need to get my lungs cleared once per week to increase my chances of surviving the pandemic. I'm willing to pay $2,000 per lung-clearing session."

---"Everything is different now. When you hear the honking sounds below, you think to yourself, 'My god, what if this is my last day on this planet for pretending that the honking sounds were a musical performance delight for my eardrums?'"

---"Whenever I call a prospective employer about a a job vacancy listing I found in The Times, I always ask that employer to tell me whether the last person who held that position is still alive. This may sound morbid, but I'm very superstitious about not wanting to accept a job offer for a position last held by someone who died while still employed there. I would find that very eerie, a situation in which a job opportunity had developed for me because the last guy turned into a corpse. I would need to study his obituary to make sure he died completely of natural causes not involving COVID-19 and no foul play was involved, before I could even consider saying 'yes' to that job offer."

--"Look at it this way. If you believed in vampires, this could be a golden era for you here in New York. You could try to get suggestions from a vampire-prevention service on how to keep vampires away from any portion of the interior of your bolt-locked condo unit at all times. I am assuming that the current medical crisis is spawning a wide variety of forms of hysteria, fear of vampires among them. One thought on vampires, by the way, is that if they suck your blood, you can always go to the hospital and ask for a blood transfusion. Come to think of it, though, that might not be an option for you if blood bank reserves are very low these days because of COVID-19."

---"I am so literary myself that I probably won't believe this is real until I read my first published fictional short story that features a character here in Manhattan who makes a reference to COVID-19. Until I see it in print in an actual published short story, this COVID crisis is very esoteric and very abstract to me. I see all of life as primarily a literary event, with the real-life 'news' being mere background to that great fictional literary adventure."