fast track, ex-press, no stops

the nyc subway is veritably its own study in top-notch Chekhovian drama and lessons from the Universe.  sometimes, i'd seriously like to pick out some randoms (folk) and have them spill it: what's your furrowed brow all about sister, what's worrying you bud, what's making you happy child, who do you love woman, who do you hate bro, what do you want man, where do you want to be darling, who do you wish you were sir, where are you coming from madame, oh, and most importantly, where are you going you fool????

sometimes, as i'm rushing to and fro, quick glimpses of something seemingly profound will hit me.  exiting the L on Lorimer platform, i looked up to see a woman in a white jacket in a Manhattan-bound train tightly grasping a pole, facing out the sliding-door window, head down, eyes closed, actually it looked rather peaceful...as the train screeched out of the station, i realized that woman had pain written all over her shut eyes, and she was crying, quite solidly.  next stop: Reality!

once, running down the stairs from the Downtown 4 to the Brooklyn-bound L, i saw a woman leading a young boy with long blonde hair like a girl, clutching and waving a white stick in front of him.  for a moment, i was so very deeply struck by this touching scene of what i thought was a young blind child in this wild morning crowd, when i realized...it was only a hockey stick. asshole!

upon exiting a particularly frightening 3 train heading home from the west side, i saw a...bum...clutching his head, large splattered drops of bright red blood strewn all about him on the dark subway floor like rose petals.  i ran away quickly to the ever-so-stressfully long underground transfer to the L at 6th avenue, and what do you imagine could possibly be waiting for me there?  rose petals, real ones, bright and red, strewn about my feet like large red splattered drops of blood: hey you, you're a star!

i can't seem to figure it all out, today and tomorrow, everything, him, him, everything, on a veranda overlooking a bay in Jamaica, me, but better, nowhere, and hopefully not straight to hell.

this is rush hour on a bridge.  there's life on that side, and life on this.  it might look like it's not moving, but right now, it is.  this is a standstill on a bridge.  there's life on this side, and life on that.  it might look like it's moving, but right now it's not.

blues and garbage

this morning, on the way out of my current homestead, i heard the most amazing, unexpected tunes floating up my block.  it was the blues (!), classy, classic, with a sort of contemporary deep house-y twist; really just mind-blowing and perfect and i wondered who in God's name was letting loose with such perfection this early in a daylight savings morn on my block.  i appreciate where i live, but usually the tunes blasting that early are the random reggaetons blasting out of souped-up wheels and tinted windows that i inadvertently start salsachachachaing to as they whiz by.  but, no...the blues.

it's morning, it's glorious, i'm in a touch of a bad mood because it's daylight savings and i can't even write to anyone to complain about the useless strain it puts on my life for the good week or so that it takes for my circadian rhythms to get shit back in tock (i mean, who could i write to?? God?  the UN??) - and oh, that, plus i'm STILL trying to figure out LOVE and you know what, it might really just involve another four letter word that doesn't even have an e or a v or an o or an l in it, so there i am all grumpysville and here comes the blues: goooooood.  morning.  

as i trip-putzed down the block at 750 which actually should have been 650 therein i still actually would have been sleeping had it only been yesterday, the source of these fantastical tunes gradually came into focus: a new york city department of sanitation......garbage truck.  yup, there they were, those men in green or orange, i can't even remember anymore, scurrying around the back of their truck, muscles a-bulging, bags a-heaving, crewcuts all over the place, scooping up my trash from all of last week that i finally got around to disposing of, and from the open doors of the truck's cab: THE SEXIEST MOTHER FUCKING BLUES TO EVER TOUCH MY SOUL

what the fuck.  seriously.    

shades of grey

every once in a while, i find that i've left a draft out in the open on this site, accidently clicked "publish" and not "save", so that months later, i'll come back and be mortified that my readers have been privy to my half-thoughts.  shame on them.  it's like watching someone with their skirt tucked into their panty hose for the length of a subway ride and not saying anything.

i won't comment on my various states of mind at those moments when all buttons - "publish", "save", "preview" and "close" - are all the exact same, and i mean all, but that reminds me of a time i worked for a spell at a hospital in the summers between semesters while at school...

i was supposed to be scheduling appointments and checking ill-folk in to the prime care clinic, but really i was usually just juggling my time between being bored to EXTREME, sick-stomach inducing agony OR stalking handsome young residents and learning their schedules so as to conveniently run into them on their lunch in the hospital caf, but that's obviously another story

anyhow, on one particularly slow day, i typed a poem out to some of the girls who worked with me.  i remember mentioning fat - fat on my own body and certain, specific others; i made fun of jerk-ass patients and waxed more than poetic on the physical attributes of some of the doctors and turned less than Shakespearian sonnetarian on some of the nurses...i remember sending that email to "all" and by all i meant the "all" on the list of recipients i had typed in, but as i sat there with the orange cursor on the small black screen blinking back at me for a very long time (it was the late 90's - no ipad in sight) before the home screen reappeared, i should have known something was up.

after sending the email on that fateful day, i went down to aforementioned caf to see if i could ever-so serendipitously run into a certain young Doctor Tellman, when instead, i ran into a girl i kinda knew from xray at the pudding bar, who, when she saw me, simply said, "I GOT YOUR EMAIL"

mortified, i ran back to my desk, trying my best to remain calm throughout the rest of the morning's duties pull this chart, cancel that appointment, when, lo, the clinic administrator called me to her office.  to make a REALLY long and terribly bed-wetting story short, it turned out that by "all", everyone in the hospital's five county network had received my ode to cellulose that afternoon.  everyone, including the board of trustees, the hot docs in ER, the president, probably even the fucking candy stripers.

the clinic admin was really a terrifying woman with short brown hair who took her job super seriously and she made it clear that she could fire me but wouldn't and sent me off telling me never to touch the computer again.

sometimes when i feel i've really messed up on something, i remember the feeling i had back then on that day when my blood ran cold and i figure, well, at least i'm not emailing everyone in five counties, AND i have a Brita.  that's a lot more than i can say for, i dunno, say, 884 million other fellow citizens around the globe.  imagine that.

agapi mou

names are so powerful.  i struggle with my own sometime, since so many people have a problem saying it, but have you ever noticed how most people's name seem to fit them just so?  it's like your friend Tom just couldn't possibly be a John or John a Tom or back to vice versa.  imagine your friend Abhicandra as a Louis or Melania as Jane or Mary Beth as Lahnny?  not right, right?

there are some names that are truly magic to me.  magic.  i see the name, be it in my mind, or flashing across the screen of my phone to alert me to a message gloriously sent to me by the person of the name in question, or randomly on some sign, street name or billboard, or maybe i run into someone else who i barely know but who has the same name, and a ZING truly shoots straight through my heart and somewhere out into the universe to Them, to that real piece of magic.  magic.  it's like all those simple consonants and vowels all come together into a visual fairydust cupcake that bears all the fruits of what you LOVE and LOATHE most in a mere mortal, all in one or two or three consonants.  that's-what-life-is-all-a-bout.  there's seven, and they seem to make perfect sense.

there is magic all around you, if i do say so myself.