These days a Manhattan Airb&b rental for less than $130 or $140 per night means a compromised, not-that-great experience. If you want any kind of breathing room you need to go north of $150 or $175 per night and even then you might feel taken. The Avenue B tenement share in which I’m staying this week is, no offense, the smallest nook I’ve ever paid to inhabit in my life outside of that awful little Chinatown flophouse in which I stayed last summer. The bathroom is so narrow and tiny you can barely breathe. You have to figure that the original building architect was driven at least partly by sadism with perhaps a little racism on the side. (“The people who will live in this building will be mostly immigrants,” etc.) But I love paying several hundred bills to flop for a few days in a place that I can barely tolerate. That’s 2014 New York for you…take it or leave it. Which is one reason why I prefer West Hollywood.

The night before last I stayed at a Days Inn in Ridgefield for about $110 per night. [Video clip below.] It was at least three or four times bigger than the place I’m in now plus it had a kitchenette and stove and everything, and cost about a third less. But who wants to flop in Ridgefield?

This subway rat, which I encountered at Brooklyn’s Franklin Ave. station, is old and hobbled and probably near death. What a life.