8-14-08 For those still paying attention

I found a penny on the subway today, and tried to pick it up while the train was coming to a stop in the station, which may have been a bad idea. Imagine, if you will: me, bent over with my natural-born ass sticking way up in the air, knees bent while I try to maintain some balance, teetering on the verge of total disaster. It must have been quite a sight, and I laughed out loud at myself to preempt any criticisms my fellow passengers might have been thinking as they observed my antics.

Also, never pick up a fortune-cookie fortune that you find just lying on the ground, because you never know what kind of day you might end up having if you take somebody's discarded fortune.

6-25-08 I happen to prefer pop.

A thick, short black guy in a white t-shirt and a black do-rag bops along the tunnel between the shuttle and the 4/5 train, headphones buried deep in his ears. He raps along with parts of the music playing in his head: “motherfucker! Shit… and I… cut ‘em out…. Ready ta….”

This is us. We bop along locked off in our own little world, regurgitating the tapes we’ve chosen as they play over and over in our heads, barely recognizing each other, barely even aware we’re repeating the words we heard, feeling safe, thinking we’re free.

6-3-08 "Antland, Antland Over All"

Walking up the stairs from the train, the woman in front of me walks deliberately, almost gently, as if she's afraid that she might break her legs if she put down her feet too sternly.

Down in the tunnel a tall, thin, brown-skinned man playing violin watches the crowd hurry past, all of them heads bowed, scurrying through the fluorescent lit, white tiled catacombs. As I pass him, he begins playing "The Ants Go Marching Two-by-Two" and I laugh, looking around to see if anyone else notices. No even looks up, and I lope down the stairs to my transfer, giggling to myself.

6-2-08 Fathers and Sons

On the subway, the father stands, the son sits. Father says something quietly to the son, and son looks at father from under his bangs with that easy contempt that comes with adolescence, shakes his head as if he is sorry that his father, who helped bring him into the world, is such an unbelievable idiot.

Son opens his sausage bagel sandwich (no egg, no cheese, I can see the ordering process – Father: “You just want sausage? No egg? No cheese?” Son: “Daa-hd! Yes! God!”) and proceeds to deliberately separate the halves that are almost, but not quite completely, cut. His hands are small and delicate, and his father quietly watches, visibly restraining himself from reaching down and doing it for him as his son fumbles, drops half, picks it up, begins again.

6-1-08 There, but for the grace of God...

Walking home from the subway after my show opened, a long walk straight down Classon Street from the G Train through Fort Greene, and it’s mostly a pretty nice neighborhood, but I have trouble letting go of my fear (is this group of people walking toward me going to hurt me? will that guy try to mug me? will I have to fight? will I have to run?). A beautiful tortoise-shell cat with a white face and green eyes walks around a tree in my path, and I make my usual “tsk-tsk-tsk” noise to get its attention, expecting it to run off, as strays usually do.

Instead it begins following me, meowing, almost running to keep up, plaintively looking up into my face to beg (something, what?) of me, and I begin to be a little worried about this very friendly cat – I mean, I can’t take it home with me because of my cat, what do I do? – until it stops in front of a door on the street and begins rubbing on the wall beside it, obviously comfortable and at home.

My heart breaks for a little cat that doesn’t know how to open a door when it wants to go inside, but I see the homeless guy on the street and I think, “ah, he probably did something to fuck up his life,” and there’s not really a difference – both are confused, lacking certain skills to be able to help themselves, maybe made a bad decision, went outside once too often and forgot how to get back in.

5-26-08

This entire weekend, I've ridden my bicycle to rehearsal in Williamsburg. It's a fun little trip, almost 4 miles each way, mostly bike paths on the way, but requiring a little more skill and alertness on the way back, since the roads are all one way, and narrower on the way from Williamsburg to Crown Heights.

Today, I didn't take my bike, but instead rode the subway, since I knew I'd be coming home late, and was worried about the lateness of the hour, and the condition of the drivers on the road, this being Memorial Day and all.

Walking home from the subway, the parties spilled out onto the sidewalks and into the streets, and I wished I taken my bike instead; at least that way I could have ridden down the center of the road and avoided all the drunk people on the way home.

5-23-08 Non-non-violence

As I walk through the long tunnel in the subway station this morning, a man wearing a blue hoodie and dark sunglasses walks against the stream of commuters walking towards Fifth Avenue.

As he passes by a man walking just in front of me, he throws his elbow out and knocks the guy sideways, and then just keeps walking, narrowly missing me, as well. The man he hit, an asian guy in a t-shirt, looks back, bewildered, before continuing on his way, and I feel sorry for him, and enraged at the asshole who hit him, to the point where I almost follow the son-of-a-bitch and knock him down, just to teach him a lesson.

Jack Kornfield, in his book A Path With Heart, suggests that many challenges in the personality will arise as one tries to calm the mind and ego, and selfishness and lust would have been my first guess for me, but the rage I've been dealing with lately has been a bit unexpected.

5-20-08 Super-size enthusiasm

The entire corner by my subway stop is cordoned off with "CAUTION" tape, and a hardhatted man with a jackhammer and a look of concentration on his face methodically tears up the sidewalk.

A girl and her little brother walk down the stairs to the subway, she in a plaid skirt and white shirt, typical school uniform, he in a blazer over white shirt and skewed tie, and he says, "They tore that building down."

"Yeah," she replies, "they tore McDonald's down."

He thinks about this as they walk through the underpass to the subway station before yelling, "I love McDonald's!"

5-19-08 Social Skills

I walk down to the G train at the Metropolitan Street station, through a long, wide hall above the platforms. A tall, lanky, bearded, vaguely homeless (shabby, but not so shabby that he might not just be an impoverished man and poor dresser with bad grooming habits) man walks down to the platform going out to Queens, and as he's about to go down the stairs, he belches.

This belch, it's a world-beater, a monster, a basso-profundo masterpiece of gastro-intestinal fortitude, literally echoing off the stone walls of the subway station. Humbled at this display, I walk downstairs to the Brooklyn side of the platform and see him across the tracks, and without breaking his stride or preparing, he lets loose another belch that resounds like the crack of doom, after which he smiles, almost proudly, and keeps walking to the end of the platform.

5-9-08 Small Victories

I leave work and head down into the bowels of Grand Central. The platform of the train I usually take is completely full, from side to side, with folks standing, waiting, all of them wearing that bored, exasperated, desperately hopeful look so characteristic of the commuting New Yorker.

I don't even bother to go down the stairs, instead grabbing a train over to Times Square and then an express down into Brooklyn. Sure enough, as soon as I get to a stop in Brooklyn, I hear that the train I would normally have taken is stalled somewhere in Manhattan, and across the platform, water pours down onto the track from the streets above.

5-7-08 Nodding Off

On the train, I set the countdown timer on my phone to go off in 15 minutes. I know that I probably won't reach my stop by that time, and I need to catch some shut-eye. Two nights of restless sleep and my stamina is shot. I woke up every hour, on the hour, for an entire night.

5-6-08 (supplemental)

A black man on the subway dressed in sweats and straight brimmed baseball cap wears a chain around his neck. On the chain are two real twenty dollar bills folded and knotted, each end of the bill waving like a wing, and seemingly daring anyone with the guts to try and take them. It's ballsy, and I can't help but stare a little.

Also, as much as people may hate the French, you gotta love how, when they're pissed about something, they fuckin' well do something.

4-14-08 Seriously? Fuck Darth Maul. And Muggers.

I dreamed about fighting with Darth Maul all night. Every time I would wound him or cut off a limb with my light saber he would heal or regenerate a new limb, until finally I grew so annoyed with the whole thing that I cut him up and liquefied him in a blender, and even then, as I awoke, the mush formerly known as Darth Maul was beginning to clump together in preparation to recombine and continue fighting.

My horoscope said that I might be confronting issues of "assertion and aggression" today, and everyone who looked at me on the subway for more than a second seemed like a potential enemy, until my adrenaline levels got so jacked up I was practically shaking as I got off at my stop. Someone was mugged there a little over a week ago in the early evening, and the thought of it makes me so angry I wish sometimes someone would mess with me so I could stick a knife in them, but I'm glad they don't because then I'd have to deal with the karma and the guilt.

4-7-08 Flowing with the Tide

Between Sixth Avenue, where the B train arrives on 42nd Street, and Fifth Avenue, a tunnel stretches to funnel commuters beneath the street. For some reason, today all of the trains in both directions arrived at the station at once, and the tunnel was full of people, hundreds of people bobbing along in the stream of bodies, all flowing down the conduit.

I was worried that, if I surrendered to the flow, relaxed and let the tide carry me, that I would lose my individuality, but I realized that if I relaxed my body, flowed with the mass, while keeping my eyes open and paying attention, that I actually was freed to be even more myself. I didn't have to push or impose my will, skirting between slower walkers and constantly searching for an opening - I could be both myself and a part of the crowd, anonymous, unremarked, necessary.

2-14-08 There is Nowhere That Does Not See You

A jostling tribe of Asian teenagers commandeer the 6-train car I'm riding, laughing and flirting and politely teasing each other. One of the lower-in-the-pecking-order girls (slightly less fashionably dressed, slightly less pretty) has a digital camera, and poses are posed all over the car: the shot of all their shoes, pointing together in a star, a couple of wide-eyed, goofy poses, two girls kissing the air, the ubiquitous "rock and roll" devil-horns hand-sign. As they took their dozens of pictures (always showing the subject their photo right away, eliciting either a laugh or a wince of pain, do I really look like that?), I wondered if anyone would ever look at them - so many pictures, how could they?

It suddenly came to me that the point wasn't the pictures themselves, but the act of taking them and the showing right after, a supreme self-conciousness and a constant sense of self-as-object - "This is what you look like when I see you, and aren't we having fun?"

2-07-08 Of Course

For the past two months, I have taken the same route from my home to work, a route I have gradually perfected: which train car to get on, which staircase to take, the beeline route I weave through the multitudinous crossing paths of my fellow commuters.

Today, I took a totally different route: different stairs, different cars - and I found my entire outlook shifted. I have always looked for the way forward through life, hoping I won't dislike it too much, waiting to put my foot down until the path appeared, never expecting to choose the way but instead waiting for what's available and choosing then.

Suddenly it came to me that I might actually be able to choose, if I wanted, to create one of the paths that came up - maybe not wholesale, but with a little bit of effort make another path, listening, head half cocked, for the voice that everyone seemed to have but me, that told them, "I want this", and which, of course, everyone has always told me to listen for, but which I never knew I had.

2-3-08 Accordian sweetness

He sits at the end of the bench on the platform in the Atlantic-Pacific station in Brooklyn, playing accordian. He sees us listening and he smiles, asking, "You like Irish music?" in a thick Italian accent.

The music is sweet and sad, everyone seems to love him, and I'm pleased to see him make a huge chunk of change in thirty seconds - it seems well deserved. A decent man making money by making people happy.

1-26-08 Old Testament R & B

I am in a train with a hobo, and he's singing "Lean On Me". A beggar has just come through the train and sung the same song not moments before, but this guy, the one singing now, is the real deal. He's got a hoarse shout deep in his throat, what I've heard the Irish call the "rarrgh" (or something like that), and when he sings, an Old Testament prophet speaks. He stomps, claps and shouts, says it's the "coming of the holy word," and finally ends his testimony with the phrase, "they say justice is blind, but justice ain't blind, it just takes its time."

1-22-08 Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again

A brief gale of depression and ennui derailed me from my goal, but I return, humbled, and requesting your indulgence.

I turn on the Weather Channel in the morning as I eat breakfast, and the music they play over the highs and lows for cities across the U.S. is soothing and innocuous, like elevator music. It is practically void of emotional or intellectual content, like a government report or the whirring of a ceiling fan.

A fight seems to break out on the platform as I ride the train to work, a scuffling of feet and angry voices, but as the train pulls away, the two men are walking along, smiling, shoulder to shoulder as they walk, talking like New Yorkers often talk, i.e. loudly and aggressively.

1-14-08 Tunnel Vision, and, I got an award

Walking the tunnel under 42nd street this morning with the swarming tumult of commuters, I hear a man playing an asian bamboo flute. He is invisible beyond the press of thousands of bodies, each of us bustling along in the hive on the way to our cells. The music is plaintive, longing, begging our souls to awaken, and I pass him, seeing his face, eyes closed and rapturous, until the music stops and starts again, fading into distance.

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Mrs. X over at The Young and the Infertile has been kind enough to nominate me for a Thinking Blogger award, and for this I am grateful to her.