Clock Never Strikes J

When waiting at an outside station, somehow the trains are always going, never coming.

The One-Man Dance

There are few things that make you feel more vulnerable than that frozen-cold moment right after you halt from a frantic scurry toward the wrong train.
You hear it approaching from a blind-spot on the stairs and spastically descend in a downward flail of disconcerted limbs, like a run to recess, with that lack of control. You completely forget you’re trying to moonlight as an adult in a metropolitan area, and physically move with the equivalence of a toddler’s squeal.
Then you catch yourself. You grip your toes to rock back to a standstill, when it becomes clear it’s the G that just rolled up, not the F. You’re left there to pull it together and conjure up any shred of cool that can be played. And believe me, it’s shreds after that nerd slaughter.

Hip Check

“This is the slowest- I could run faster than this!”
Spoken by the guy awkwardly gripping his girlfriend’s hip. Don’t attempt an arm wrap-around on a flat, oddly shaped bench.
He was right though. About 1:30 AM and the train was moving like it. One by one readers tucked their books away and dropped their heads. A solid row of puckered lips and bunched chin skin resting on wool scarves, all colors pulled from a rainbow of dark neutrals.
The train’s ears must’ve started burning, because literally as I started penning this it picked up like someone just lit a torch under its ass. And thankfully, because I don’t think I can hear hip grabber talk ANYMORE about his too-worn vans for another quiet second. I’m sure the sleeping scarf sniffers agree. Talk about a boring bedtime story.

Channel Surfing

There must be some imaginary TV screen behind me, or some zombie plague hitting the entire other side of the train car, because everyone planted on the opposing blue bench is literally zoned in toward the same blank window. The only thing I see through it is darkened subway innards flying by at high speed, like a quick slide-show of an alcoholic’s liver.
Is it the winter drear? Is blinking out of fashion? The long, dark faces balance out the short daily appearance of the sun. Everybody’s heads are bowed and capped by beanies and bad moods.
The only person who doesn’t seem to give a shit, who’s maintaining a bit of brightness, is a little girl in some kind of pink-knit hat with ears, or horns (who can tell the difference on kids?). By girl I mean toddler. She’s almost making subway children seem tolerable, but I know minimal stops will be made before some small screamer will tornado into the car, and my cringe will instinctively return.

Happy Groundhog Day, Also…

This blog has been hereby themed. It’s train talk now, with the occasional mention of other transportation-related debauchery.

Flu Season

Whenever I’m housing an import from California, it’s like taking a giant golden poppy onto the subway that every east coast bee wants to sink his stinger into. That metaphor is verbal, not sexual. They wanna talk at those friendly faces. It’s like they see the remnants of sun on the curves of their cheeks. They wanna lick the vitamin D off them. The other night, G bound, a man’s twitching eye landed on mbacior.
‘Look at that girl, man’ he said, pointing to a frightened teenager a couple seats over. ‘Wouldn’t mind her next to me in a cadillac, no no,’ he cackled; his mouth was frozen open with clear silence between each guffaw, like a broken laugh track.
A completely harmless man, just using his lungs to punch air into the otherwise quiet subway car. His giant black hat sat furry and sideways on his head, like it was balancing with featherweight. He launched into a story that took up the last seven stops before our exit. Something about going to see his girl in Springfield, arguing with a bus driver in Boston and somehow always circling back to how overjoyed he was to be home in New York. About a week later we saw him in a completely different area of Brooklyn. Same hat.
Another problem with my Californians? I swear they jinx my sense of direction. Goes to complete shit. Yet another night ago, a 25-minute single-train ride home turned into four trains, including two unnecessary Q rides and a freezing, lengthy wait at an outside station. All-in-all, a 2-and-some-hour process. I NEVER get lost when I’m solo. I’m like a drug dog; the crack’s the destination and I get there with no problem.
But now once again my west coast visitor has migrated, and only one bird is left east. I sit in a halo of quiet on the subway while no one bothers me, my warm glow apparently wearing off a bit. Nobody wants to say a word to me, not even the woman across from me who’s taped paper towels to her knees, over her jeans, and also around her ankles. She look eerily similar to an older lady who used to spend nights outside an old diner I used to frequent in California. The two might be contending for most makeup ever worn by a human in one night.
So I eat up my silence with thought. Everyone around me is coming down with some 24-hour stomach flu, where they begin furiously barfing and don’t stop ’til their x-rays mimic an empty fish bowl.
What if instead of tangible, sticky barf, if out of nowhere, as the illness tends to strike, people started confessing all their thoughts? Uncontrolled. Uncensored. Does the man who was rattling off on the G just have some sort of mind flu? Is that called insanity? Is this entry, this entire blog, a product of that very disease? I’m fine with that.

Girl From The North County

More often than not, I’d rather be quiet. Not have quiet- give me blaring music, crashing sound waves with a vicious under-toe of distortion- but just actually be quiet. I’d rather not talk. I wanna feel the stillness of my throat, and know it’s at a complete halt. Not snoozing, just stilling. But in those rare moments when I do indeed want to talk at unknown length, I search out the perfect ear in which I plan to beach my tidal bores of untitled miscognition I can’t sort out in that precious quiet, that I so dearly and usually love faithfully.
That talking desire happened. Recently. But I knew the ear in a minute. So I sped north through a railed hole below the pavement to find it. Them. Her. The pair of ears, the girl who owns the ears; who functions them. I thought of all those old epics where the lead is desperate for solid answers, so he scales a mountain of some sort to seek an infinitely old cave, housing a wise elder who never looks the least bit impressed someone made such a trek for a few words of rational advice. Apparently never heard of a fortune cookie, but I digress…
So, my knowledgeable one cocoons herself on the third story of a green man-made mountain, slanged on the maps as the neighborhood of Bed Stuy. We sat with loose limbs on her green love-seat as she lent her ears and fully wide heart to all my half-assed confessions and sloppy epiphanies. She let me throw up a hundred what-ifs and wiped them up like a proud mom tending to her darling. Her few responses were like drinking ice water. When we part I always leave with a cleaned-out head. I returned home in a sea of black coats on the F train, walked into my room and pleaded with quiet for monogamy once again.

To: A Certain Degree

I know the sun is out.
I can eye it, plainly plotted in the sky; the open reflection of a cluttered, over-built below.
I see that white sun.
But if I were blind, and not in my metaphorical way that repeatedly leads me to told-you-so corners, but in a straightforward visual sense, I’d be lost for the hour. It could be the dead-middle of night, because it’s so cold out it feels black.
It’s fucking ice air. My skin is cracking into a thousand coldly carved lines, knifed by an unforgiving wind.
From the inside of the glass lobby of the Brooklyn Museum, I waited for a friend to scamper in. I watched the red-cheeked and hatted walk with immediacy on the sidewalks.
Although I tend to whine when my coat’s too worn to hold me in a protective, warm embrace, in all honesty I don’t ENTIRELY mind the cold (don’t disregard the presence of ‘entirely’ in this sentence). It has a few redeeming qualities. It’s pristine; it’s nature’s way of hushing up the globe, of muffling New York.
However, there is one thing that becomes all too prominent with this silencing. That would be the presence of filth. See, the summer’s full of hot distractions, and everything is covered in sleek sweat so maybe it’s just a lot of alluring shine. But in winter, for some odd reason anything moderately dingy is amplified, and waiting in a cold, dirty subway is equated with killing time in a dungeon.
As I waited- luckily sans shackles- for the F train, I noticed the cold is flaring up pain in my left ear, in which the drum’s been beaten far too aggressively over the years by an unhealthy noise addiction, and standing next to way too many stacked speakers. I felt it by my molars; the ache increasing with the degree decrease, like when a sailor knows a storm’s edging close from the shooting pain in his bum knee.
Just when it seems like the oppressive winter is taunting me with an upper hand, I receive this Tennessee Williams quote today from my mom, timed perfectly as the renewal I need to accept that winter’s chewing me in its frigid-cold mouth, but at least when I’m swallowed and travel months down 2010’s throat, I’ll fall into the belly of a warm spring, a.k.a. allergy season.

Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes, you’ll know you’re dead. -Mr. Williams

Legs

Morning F train.

Dog Land

I’m down the lower leg of 5th ave., approaching the ankle of W. 4th st., the subway’s heel, all on my own two weary, booted feet. Square in front of me is a man with two giant dogs (that’s as far as I get with decifering breeds; giant and little), cleaning up their freshly laid shit.
The human-dog relationship in New York leaves me skeptical. I can’t quite figure who owns who. If someone followed me around and hand-picked up my shit I decided to drop on the open-day sidewalk, I’d consider them somewhat in my service. The leash is just jewelry. Better yet, it’s like a bridesmaid carrying the bride’s dress train.

(sidenote- I was buried under the idea it was called bride’s dress tail, but corrected by the laughing wife.)