So I had the good fortune to pay a visit to the Brooklyn bazaar a couple days ago. It Is a fascinating place, full of sundry wears and exotic peoples. There were hipsters in their natural habitats, song, dance, good food, and all was merry. As in many things, there was a considerable amount of effort expended just to get there, though. Traveling is a very interesting state of being because it is both the entirety of our existence, and a momentarily suspension of our lives, depending on your perspective. We are always seeking-for, going-to, aiming-towards. Travel, movement, migration, adaptation, are all features that are intimately and inexorably human. Also human are conceptual permanency, concreteness, and goals upon which we fix our desires and drives. We travel Towards things, and in so doing, our lives are defined as shooting towards that aim. So yeah, traveling is weird. Whatever. In this particular instance, while traveling to Brooklyn, I had to take many forms of Public Transportation, as well as personal and private conveyance. What follows are my thoughts and musings on the subject.
My trip from New Jersey to Brooklyn begins with getting to a train station. Traveling to travel. Upon recognizing that it should take exactly 25 minutes to get to the train station, an unusual event occurs. Every part of my being understands rationally what constitutes 25 minutes. I have spent 13,224,960 minutes on this Earth at the time of this writing, and I feel like I am comfortable with my understanding of the passage of time. Yet, despite this, reaching the train station with a comfortable lead is absolutely beyond my capacity. And so, inevitably, my trip begins as so many others before it; in a tremendous hurry. Rushing to relax. Traveling has a knack for introducing these weird dualities into life. My cohort and I rush to the station. The wind is bellowing, the planet itself seems to be excited with the same nervous energy that is motivating us forward at a rate and velocity exceeding that which is lawfully permissible. Law Breaking is not okay kids, and I do not encourage it. My companion for this trip, a sultry young lass with questionable driving experience, rather gratuitously corners the lane and nearly drifts us into a spot. I shake my head; if I were an expecting father and my child was to born This Instant, and he was bringing with him Pots O’ Gold into this world, I still do not think I would hurry his mother-to-be to the hospital as quickly as I have labored to meet an approaching train. Something about waiting an extra hour in an NJ Transit station just Looms over you, so that you feel as though there is no other choice; you simply must make the train. And sure enough, we do.
On the platform with minutes to spare, my compatriot, a rather minute woman named Katie, brags that she has taken so many trains that she can predict where on the platform the door to the train will appear. Where this prideful attitude towards abject human suffering comes from is beyond me. It seems akin to the entitlement of an experienced warrior. I fought in ‘Nam, gat dangit, it is Veteran’s Day, and I want my Gat Dang Grand Slam with extra Links ON THE HOUSE! Or, maybe it is simple one-upsmanship.”I had to wait in an hour of traffic.” “Oh yeah? Well I had to wait for a train next to a questionably human entity that smelled of boiled cheese.” In any case, I nod and smile. I look forward to her being wrong. Something about traveling brings out a sense of schadenfreude in the traveler. Everyone is a potential adversary and obstacle. My victory over them will bring me closer to my Goal. Friends and loved ones matter not, so long as I am the Leader, Leading us to the Promised Land. My survival instincts seem to be responsible for this. The train whistle blares; the time has come. The cars arrive, brake exhaust fills the air, and sure enough, the train stops with the doors 15 feet too far to the right. I smirk sardonically; my transformation into Traveling Shithead has begun.
The train itself is full of people in suspended animation. We sit down, unable to do anything, yet incapable of doing nothing. Social pressures dictate that we can’t simply stare; it is rude and strange. Yet people-watching seems to be precisely the one activity being on a train encourages. I look around at the variety of folks, young and old, and settle in for the ride. Perhaps taking note that we have all been successfully sealed in, a baby begins to wail at the top of its lungs. I take out my phone to absentmindedly scroll back–and –forth. Nothing is accomplished. We are moved, not movers. Everyone looks either anxious or completely Out of this World. The ability to filter out and ignore everyone around you, as if an astronaut on a foreign planetary body, is an invaluable tool when traveling. These grizzled veterans of the process clearly have their Shit Together. I strain a conversation with my associate; unwilling to speak so loud as to disturb others in their willful ignorance, and constantly having to interrupt her because I can’t hear a damn thing she says over the roaring engine. Graciously, we cease the effort and begin separately checking our phones again. I stare at the back of the seat. Somehow, I am in a tunnel. It grows dark. I emerge, and I am in NY. I know this because there is a constant hum and growl in the background. Like a great, Roaring River, except instead of water it is the life-blood of the people of a metropolis. Very surly blood. The world screeches, whines, and stops scrolling by my window. Everyone stands, as if to say “ME FIRST”. This strikes me as inefficient, yet I too stand. I am no longer possessed of myself, I have completed my metamorphosis. I am a shithead, now, and I am amongst my people.
We jostle our way off the train. We jostle across the platform. Jostling is the new walking. Katie grabs my hand and pulls me up a stalled escalator. We are taking advantage of a sick and failing machine for our own personal gain. A sea of people follow us, exploiting the death of this simple device. I find myself in a labyrinth, only instead of hedges or walls, it is an ever-changing, crisscrossing mass of people. People in line for tickets, people in line for exits, people queuing up for food and drink and whatever else one could, in theory, wait for. I feel like the Grinch, preparing to steal Christmas. We slide and weave and, oh yes, jostle, our way over to reward ourselves with a ride on the Subway. If the train is the noble Pachyderm of modern transportation, then the subway is most assuredly the Ass. Slow, obstinate, and braying all the way, the subway will periodically stop for no reason. It will yell at you to STAND CLEAR OF THE CLOSING DOORS, and it will occasionally, as if it had an inscrutable will of its own, do whatever the fuck it wants. It is this untamable beast that I will seek to sooth and ride.
Screaming in protest at the absolute top of its lungs, the subway train pours into the station, resisting every attempt to stop it. Somehow, the conductor wrangles it into submission. The doors robotically slide open and hover, menacingly, waiting to snap shut on me the moment I attempt to board the train. We get on, and mercifully the rest of the ride is uneventful.
True to form, the duality of Travel must be conceptually complete at every level. Thus, on the morrow, we depart to repeat the process in reverse. Mirroring the journey of the prior evening, weagain walk to the subway and wait for a train to arrive. This process is made approximately over 9000 times worse by the fact that I have a hang-over. A brunch consisting of no less than three total beverages has done little to soothe the injury to my soul. Everything is magnified in a nagging, aggressive manner. The train tumbling into the station like a drunken hobo does little to assuage the sense I have that everything is turning against me. We get on the train. The unthinkable happens. A quartet breaks out, mid-ride, singing HE IS RISEN for the pending Easter holiday. I can barely contain my rage as they panhandle at us, the poor unfortunate captive riders of the A Train. How dare they, how dare they break the sacred silence, all that we, the weary shitheaded travelers, have left? I cannot more aggressively ignore these people, and I honestly am wishing, hoping, that one of them will look at me and give me Any Reason Whatsoever, to tell them off. Perhaps sensing this, they skip right over me. I am floored as the woman next to me gives them a dollar. What the fuck? You are rewarding people for strategically harrassing others on a train? Why? What about this behavior is commendable? You ridiculous bitty, they are manipulating you. They are trying to manipulate all of us. I sigh, resigned. All the anger flows out of me, and a sense of futility weighs on me. This is the world I live in; these are the people I live there with. I must accept that so long as there is a woman who will pay people to exploit others on the train, there will always be utterly ridiculous bullshit on public transportation early in the morning when everyone needs to just Chill Out. I sit quietly, stare at an Advertisement En Español and attempt to translate the fine print. We get to the station at last, and I have successfully secured a personal injury attorney.
Somehow Saturday Morning is even busier than Friday Night. Go home people; sleep in, rest your tired eyes. It is a Day of Rest, and I just want to go home. I am deep in the Traveler’s abyss. Katie cannot even raise her face to look at me; we are like translucent specters, only vaguely aware that each other is even present anymore. But all is not lost; it seems we have made unexpectedly good time. An earlier train awaits us! The knowledge that we could potentially escape invigorates us. We smile, human once more, and begin a mad dash to the train. But, not to be defeated so easily, the station has one final trial in store for us. Some-and I use this term with sincerity and respect for just how true it really is- some Absolute Idiot has decided to get on the escalator with a bunch of sagging garbage bags full of dead cats and old clothes or whatever bullshit garbage this stupid man values in his meaningless blip of an existence. Of course, sagging dead cat garbage doesn’t just slip n’ slide all over, and it instead becomes wedged between the floor and the rising escalator steps. “Woah, Woah!” the man exclaims, as if this was the most unexpected thing that could have possibly happened; as if the very laws of physics, the firmament of the universe, have been torn asunder. He pulls, he pulls in the direction of the snag, as if he has never encountered a Caught Object before. Truly, and honestly, the world would be a better place if he had never been born. But I do not contemplate this, because I am instead growing increasingly worried as I rise towards this fucking buffoon. I think fast; I leap over his pile of trash. I am safe and off the escalator. One bag is now askew, sideways, on the floor. “Hey!” he yells, angrily. I am incredulous. But…but you’re a complete idiot…surely you see how this is your fault? I want to lecture him, I want to throw him down some stairs, but instead, all I do is look at him in my Traveler’s fog and say “Hey, it was pushing up”. I am not sure what I even mean by this, but seeing this guy struggle with his bags brings a smile to my face. He says “Yeah man, laugh it up”. I wish I could, Oh in the deep, dark abyss I find myself, I wish I could spend my remaining days just laughing at this man, making him small and pathetic. I wish I could take each bag and throw it down the steps and make him pick it up. I want to make him my Sisyphus, and have him haul his wares up the escalator only to have me throw them down, laughing, for all eternity. But I am running late. I jostle my way to the platform entrance , and we arrive just in time. A dark tunnel, a dim light, and sunlight emerges. I feel my energy being restored, my mood improving, and a dense haze lifts from my mind. It is time to return home.