Category Archives: Subway

Alcohol, Journal, Subway , , 4 Comments

Someone! 

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Ran for the train. Caught the train.

Last night I went out drinking and drunk texted everyone, even the girl from Boston. Anyone will do when I get drunk. I feel so lonely at home. I never want to leave the bar. But I left around 2:30 and was all responsible and took a car and shit and got home safe and when I got there I was pissed and lonely.

Then I woke up this morning feeling so embarrassed about the dumbass texts I had sent.

Then I worked twelve hours and now I’m on the fuckin train home and it’s way before midnight. 

People are making out like fuckin emus over here. All necks and awkwardness. 

Other Minds, Subway, Thoughts , , 3 Comments

Interlude

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When two guys are walking together and one guy is listening to his headphones near them, those two guys are friends and the other guy is an enemy. When two guys are alone and listening to their headphones and walking down the street near each other, they aren’t enemies or friends. When two guys are alone and listening to their headphones and they attempt to use their metrocards to gain access to the subway and they are both rejected by the same turnstile, they are friends. 

Journal, Subway , , 4 Comments

Interlude

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I didn’t smoke weed, and I didn’t drink, but under the fluorescent lights of Canal Street Station I feel like a thing that slithers. Somehow my fingernails got dirty. I was walking with the girl who I was formerly obsessed with, and I was telling her what I thought was a very interesting story. What I know was an interesting story, in fact, from her gasps every time we hit a pivotal point. And then, in the middle, we ran into some old friends of hers she hadn’t seen in a while. She’s from here and she’s popular, so this happens a lot. There were eight of them. Normally I would just smile and shake everyone’s hand and all that, but I just couldn’t give a fuck about these people and how they knew each other and anything like that, so I stood off to the side and waited for her to ask for her bag so she could go with them. I enjoyed the breeze and I checked my phone. Finally she called me over and her friends were like wtf why are you just standing over there! Meanwhile she had just asked minutes ago why I never do what I want. So that was the thing I wanted, to not talk to these people. I was really fine with her leaving with them, very convenient escape for me, but I did not want to meet them all for no reason. But I did anyway because what kind of asshole would I have to be to hand her her bag and say goodbye and nothing else. So I shook hands with every single one of them. There were people she didn’t even know and I shook hands with them, too. One guy said now repeat our names back to us. I said, I value you guys as people but I don’t have a memory like that. Everyone thought that was funny. You had to be there. So now I look awesome. From weirdo to awesome in sixty seconds. After five excruciating minutes where everyone tried to pretend that we could have an inclusive conversation, they ask what’s up next. I hand my friend her bag and say goodbye, shaking hands with enthusiasm and warmth and real kindness in my eyes. Eight people I will never see again, now they all have a piece of my soul. The train just won’t seem to arrive. 

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Getting Somewhere 

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A small lady carrying a bag talks on the phone in a foreign language while a man carrying an iPad pretends to listen to music. It’s early on Saturday morning and someone is regretting their brunch reservation. A woman stands up further down the train and starts a practiced rant. Your stop comes up and you leave, thinking about next year. There are more of them outside and you see the ones doing something interesting for a second and then they, too, fade.

Journal, Subway , , 8 Comments

Three Trains

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I was busy this morning writing and revising what I wrote. Writers have notebooks. I don’t have time to make sense of that. I’m on the subway to work. I barely was able to feed the cats and all of that. I was writing and writing. It snowed and I watched, like I was living in Boston again. I set up the kitchen stool next to the bed so I could use it like a desk.

I came down the stairs to the subway and the train was just leaving. Just missed it. Another one came quickly. I’m taking three trains today instead of one because it snowed, better to stay underground.

Switching trains now. Kids everywhere, school just let out I guess. Scarlet Johansson is in a new movie about women wearing tight clothes. I started using product in my hair and it itches. I don’t wash it.

I had a thought halfway through he tunnel to the next train, but I forgot it.

Today meditation told me to be balanced. That’s ok. Don’t let your mind run away unless you mean for it to do. What now?

No money because it snowed, and the old me would say no bridge and tunnel weirdos, too, but now I say…those people are okay. Who doesn’t like fettuccini alfredo anyways.

Can’t believe I lost that thought in the tunnel. It would have made this post. Something about switching. Got distracted by a kid’s backpack. The monopoly man was fleeing the bank in a jail outfit.

Hair itches. Big hat because it snowed. Nothing like that. Switching doors each stop so I can lean and type. Nothing like that.

I started typing out journals again. Journal entries. Just typing and typing sometimes. I had switched to hand writing. Now I switched back. Maybe the problem is switching. Too much switching in one life. I’ll never fill up a whole notebook with handwriting by the end of the year at the pace I’m going. I’d better switch to something faster. Some faster state of mind wherein I still hamdwrite shit for some reason.

Hit the square. Be kind. Don’t think. Don’t tune out tho.

Up the stairs stay close to the crowd but then a dude flies down right in front of you trying to catch the train you just left.

Been cold at home with the heat off, put on the big hat and go out in the snow, you’re warm for the first time all day.

Train pulls up you’re at the top of the stairs and you find yourself in the exact situation as that dude who almost ran you over earlier. Crowd is coming toward you, climbing the stairs, you got to fly down and let the chips fall where they may. Probably would have been clear if not for them people suddenly pausing in the aisle.

Almost to work and how did it happen.

Last night I ate too much chicken and I was sweating the whole shift. Tonight I’m wearing wool socks.

Journal, Subway , , 6 Comments

Bowery Station

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There’s an old man with a white beard who works at the Bowery subway station who is always happy to help. People wave to him. I remember the first time I waved at him and thought I was the only one. Then when everyone waved to him and he waved back I got jealous. I was a little hurt. Now I don’t mind. Now I think it’s nice. My friend had the same reaction. “Oh, I’m not special?” Shit it’s not like we ever brought him cookies or anything.

We thought about it though. I didn’t think about it for long. You don’t want to put someone in the position of having to trust a stranger’s cookies.

That’s kind of like another thing that happens at that station.

There’s a sign that faces a bench where people sit and the sign tells you which direction the train is coming from. The bell goes off and the arrow on the sign lets you know whether you should go downstairs. Sometimes the bell goes off and I can’t see the sign. I want to ask the people on the bench which way the train is coming, but I don’t trust them to not fuck with me. So when I’m sitting on the bench and people are looking at the back of the sign, wondering which way the arrow is pointing, I don’t tell them. I don’t tell them because then they’d be forced to either trust me or very obviously display their (warranted) distrust of strangers.

Journal, Politics, Subway , , 4 Comments

Can’t Go Home

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I got a wheezing in my chest and I can’t get my wireless headphones to sync up with Spotify so as I walk down the streets of Bed Stuy I find myself a shuffling broken down white man with a 2 year old iPhone playing Wiz Khalifa loud enough for the church going folk to assume that I only like songs that played on the radio six years ago. Just another Sunday morning. We do things to embarrass ourselves so that we can feel more connected with our undignified brethren, aka the rest of the human species. I’m about to let you know, a mother fucker is downright uncouth out here on these streets on an unseasonably warm day for the clocks to jump ahead (bastards).

I just walked by the projects. I got a white friend who lives in there but mostly it’s black people. I went down in the subway and came out in the part of south Williamsburg owned by Hasidic Jews. I just googled how to spell Hasidic and a picture of where I just walked was the first result. I jaywalked past a police car and I’m wearing a Trayvon Martin hoodie. Last night, a police car stopped at the crosswalk for me like they almost never do. Last year two weeks before Christmas a policeman walked me to my door in what was a taped off crime scene after a guy shot to death two police officers in a car down the block.

Where I live when you get on the subway there’s all kinds of people and they are all poor. Look at this guy over here asleep on the way back to work, about sixty years old wearing a hat that says I Love Jesus to distract God from the fact he can’t make it to church this morning.

Yeah but the old poor people and the new poor people ain’t the same. Gentrification, in case you don’t hear that word every five minutes like I do, is when comparatively well to do mother fuckers roll into a historically poor neighborhood and start raising rents in various ways both direct and indirect. Here in Bed Stuy it’s easy to see who just moved in. They’re poor in money but rich in inheritance having been the accidental benefactors of four hundred years of economic favoritism.

In America you either take way too much or you get nothing at all.
When I first moved here I told an old Latino on the train that I felt bad because I was part of a bunch of white people taking over the neighborhood and he said anybody who told me that doesn’t want to work for a living. Opinions are all over the map on this shit. I don’t know what the fuck is happening. What I do know is that my life correlates very strongly with an alarming number of social trends and that makes me feel…dumb as hell. 

Oh well. Pattern recognition comes for us all. 

Journal, Subway , , 1 Comment

Walking in Smooth 

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Nah see what I meant to say was that have you ever tried to do something and you weren’t wearing gloves and by God you should have been wearing gloves hadn’t you? My finger is fucked up right now. Looks like a hole in it goes straight to yellow hell. Got some old Loreal commercial desert lines in it.

Man have you ever been waiting for the train and you were listening or rather you were half listening for the alarm sound that goes off and is obnoxious as hell most of the time but this one time you didn’t hear it? Things were going well. I was doing all the things that I told myself I would do and then suddenly I realized I hadn’t heard the alarm. I watched the train leave from an impossible height and it was gone and I was already down there watching it go. I was down there with the rats. I leaned against the post and tried to remember how I survived those MRIs I did for money. I remembered how I breathed and how I pretended I was doing yoga. I did that and I waited for the next train to come, even though I knew it was never, ever going to come.