Evil on the Train: a True Story of 3AM and the Blues

3 AM blues on the F train to BK. The heat drew my eyelids towards the ground, darkening the bleariness, the spin around me, my eyes red, hat crooked, head nodding to some tired melody beating in my ear. Hat crooked because at 3AM alone on the train, who the fuck cares? The twin losses of inhibition and ambition inspire lunatic fashion nonsense. Head nodding, limp walking, ba-doom-ba-pa, why not? Not a rattle to be heard in the distance of the high ceilinged tunnel, tiles cracking, water dripping in the still. Club music still pounded at my head, the same head pounded back at me: “had-to-drink-that-last-one-dumbass-boom-ba-da-pa.” Drunk. Thick heat, strong beat, the bass-line played and the heat sat.

…get down, James Brown screamed into the abyss, de-de-de-de-dee-ba-dow, with my girlfriend…Yes you did…

…that ain’t right…hurl and cuss…de-ba-ba

…wanna fight…

And then she came down the stair like Persephone into Hades, calm, composed, not belonging to this dungeon beyond time. She sat on the bench in the heat, bored.

…payback…is a thing you got to see…

hell…never do any damn thang to me…

At 3AM, subway platforms are stages of defeat. The night has ended, cab money swallowed by the dark, and it has come to this: waiting, sitting, maybe 10 minutes, maybe 90, maybe to fall asleep and end up in Coney Island bathed in dawn’s sweet glow, sleeping near an unconscious homeless man so far from home that a kind of fleeting camaraderie is born, you and he, the family of the screeching metal abode. Drunks throw up waiting on night trains. Sweat and exhaustion inundate time. Construction workers look on in quiet indifference as they close down the tunnel that seemed to surely hold the any-minute-I’m-home-promise. At 3AM you ride the train with the blues.

But she was there.

Not so porcelain-pretty as to seem arrogant or unapproachable, she was a 3AM platform’s dream. Her features were intense. Tall with long, dark hair, casual, warm: she was the ultimate defeat. Head nodding two seats away on the bench, I would never talk to her. Only crazy people and slick-talking frat-boys talk to people on trains. Despite the futility, it’s creepy, desperate, invasive. It’s the kind of thing that sends generations of people into the seclusion of automobiles, watching their strip mall paradise fly by through the windshield at rush hour. Was my pluck responsible for the suburbanization of the world?

I wouldn’t talk to her because I couldn’t, because no matter where the inhibitions go, the cool has to stay. I wouldn’t talk to her because I could never make first moves, because I was weak, and awkward, because I hate to be in control of anything other than me, and the music that pounds out of my stereo.

But…I should, right? I should take the leap, where was the downside—I would never see anyone on this train again. Why not? Do it!

--But how? No, impossible. I would, but it won’t work.

--Bitch, that’s why you’re going home by yourself.

How then?

--Go say hi.

Creepy motherfucker.

--Home Alone, Bitch. They made a movie about you!

Could I just take off the headphones and stare at her?

--And you just called me creepy? I guess it’s better than nothing…bitch.

…do ba da…big payba…The music died. I sat and glanced at her, head pounding. The train rattled into the station and we boarded. F to Jay street, A to Nostrand, bing, stand clear of the closing doors.

An hour later I had her phone number and was madly in love. I found myself believing in Jesus, Mary and Joseph. I was a 3AM winner, taking this fine girl to dinner. Out late, couldn’t sleep for a week, my head nodded only to happy beats.

Two weeks later it was over, God was dead and I was waiting, heart broke with heat stroke, for the A train again. Fuck it. This time the music played. Because at 3AM, all you want is the blues.

Wondering If I should become a pioneer in the study of Che Guevara and political violence. Decisions.

The prospect of doctoral study is immensely appealing. The excitement of crafting a new idea, of analyzing, disputing, combatting the forces of knowledge. It's essentially a path towards a lifetime of liberal arts study. Is it relevant? Does it matter? Would I better serve the world as a cog in the machinery of society? I guess when you phrase it like that...

There's something artistic that I'm hoping to capture in this life. I'm not a manager, I create. Details are not beyond me, rather they excite me when the larger picture is strikingly clear. Only if it's striking, though.

I guess simple utilitarian effectiveness isn't what I'm after. I want to be effective, but I'd rather make something perfect--the perfect song, the perfect book, the perfect picture. Truth is the highest form, the loftiest pursuit. Truth is where we transcend our humanness.

When Whitney Houston sings "One Moment in Time," it's not particularly sophisticated or deep, not incredible for its provocation; it's perfect. When Biggie bounces out how "I just speak my peice, keep my peice, n***** wit the jesus peice, wit my peeps..." it's perfect. It's tight, it means something, it matters. When Faulkner's preacher takes the pulpit perfection is in the rafters.

Perfection is finite, tied down, paralyzed; perfection is the antithesis to what it means to be human. Humanity is the process, the struggle, the motion. Perfection is still.

Perfection is why people smoke. The moment overtakes them, the future, the concerns, nothing matters. That's why artists are often drugged out--or at least tend that way.

So will a ph.d get me that? Or will it plunge me into a morass of semantic minutia?

There was a fall night when I pushed living as it's supposed to be pushed, when the wind and the rain meshed with my own sense of love, and wildness stirred in its contorted and disorienting fervor; wildness, wind, the pangs of existence and living pushed forward--the suffocating stench of rotten-rose life. Fuck it.

But it wasn't. And yet it was.

There was something there that was important. I don't know what it was.

Once caught her changin
the battery to her halo...

What is that far off look--that desperate, confident, defiant, dead look? Where is that place? Where does it live, where does it lay?

I don't know why I started a blog. I don't have anything to say. Truth is, though, there's something wonderful about defiance. It's interesting to think about as a person of authority. How does one promote disobedience and manage to promote anything at all? Truth is, I was never a real rule breaker. I just don't respect rules. But I don't respect them because I fear them. Truth is, nothing has power unless someone gives it power. Repression is what makes Russian lit great. Juxtaposition is what makes life great.

There's a great Gardner Taylor sermon...Enemy? Victory! Cross? Crown! The juxtaposition of the kingdom!

What do people expect from this life? Can we be comfortable when we're dead? Ruminations from the original watermelon eater...

Hey...Dr. Jay...where you got those moves?
Was it gettin high in the school? Can it be the shoes?

It's the politics of the sneaker pimps

Some days your mind clears and things feel good. What is this crazy-ass thing called motivation? It's a shame that there aren't deeper questions on my mind.

McCarthy (Cormac, not Eugene) talks about the slaughter of thousands for a flowerblossom. White Tiger writerman says people are slaves when they can't see life's beauty.
I say, what beauty?
Life is life: powerful and often less than expected. Some days I like to pretend that a moral code keeps my profession geared to good and my MN geared to nice. The truth is, for this--all this--I was programmed. Nothing more, nothingless, nothing less.

Sometimes I'm proud. Programmed.

There are those fleeting instances when the lights shine down, the air is clear, and the night is new. Sirens; muffled discontent: nothing is certian. People we care about die, approach death. We approach it too, insodoing approach life.

Politics.

I don't get addicted to much, but one of these days I gotta get hooked on living. Or at least something that isn't the internet.

Institutionalist

Good column here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/opinion/27brooks.html?hp

Who are the institutionalists? I see them at work, in various functions. There is something impressive about them. They seek to fill a role, to be someone--despite the fact that that someone has already existed.

This relates to Plato's forms: the idea that there is an essential essence to everything: for every woman an ideal woman, for every table, a perfect table. These forms, of course, limit themselves to the realm of mind. There is no ideal table, or basketball player, or woman for that matter. Yet the institutionalist can see the ideal. World record holding runners see it. Overachieving teachers see it.

The existential path is more immediately attractive. What is the purpose of seeking an ideal when meaning only exists where you make it? If you can't find your own bearings in this world, what use is there in finding excellence in the bearings of others?

Brooks is too smart to be republican.

Did the G-train kill Gotham?

I lie puzzled as I backtrack to earlier times
nothing's equivalent
to the New York state of mind

It is a state of mind: the rattle beneath the corner store, C train commotion, yells and gusts, clocktower--skybeam--sunset, the burned out buildingfront on top of the park. The fear and excitement, the purple hightops, big glasses and scarves. It is the bigness and the badness, the madness and the sadness.

The mind-state: why gentrification matters, the loss of that impervious grit. And yet, poverty is still real, class-clown favorites stabbed on the block: the grit lives on. "You know he'll call ACS, that's why I don't say shit," paranoia, etc: the grit lives, never what it seems. Perceptions are what change, mind-states might die. Flashes of crazy, flashes of love: mind-state. But, then, nothing is really any different except that you thought it was.

Back to the old days, but mind-states live there too because what was remembered is different than what was. 4th ave bustle, the app now, down 32nd, townhouses falling to peices, California...knows how to party, even if we'd never been there: different than what was.

Life is what gets in the way. New York is a place where you just want to be.

Taxidermy

I'd like to go back to when we played as kids.
Things change.
That's just the way it is.

Something beautiful in the unfulfilled: the potential of every moment to be great or terrible or never to happen at all.

Life is made up of these fleeting connections, ephemeral relationships that would be worthless were they permanent. And yet that's what gives life meaning. Of course longevity is valuable in itself, but things are in constant flux. People from the past lose significance in the present, only to regain it in the future. The necessities of the person you are today, different than who you were yesterday, create new connections and destroy old, and then you fucking die.

This is starting to sound really positive.

Can you imagine being Obama? Every friendship you develop as president is colored by the fact that everyone you meet has wrapped your face up in the threads of an historical narrative. Every friendship you developed before you were president is locked into the state it was before it became colored by the arc of history. What happens if you're one of the people rotating into the whitehouse to keep Obama company--one of his friends--and you realize that you and Obama really aren't that close? I guess you shut up.

David Brooks has me worried about the stumulus package. Krugman says it's not enough money. Brooks says it's too much money to spend effectively. It seems both might be right. The republicans are wrong: buisiness tax cuts won't stimulate employment in this environment. What about bailing out state governments? What about bailing out Halliburton? Can we still do that?

Focus on the art. It's sure as fuck not going to focus on you.

There's something wild about living in any particular era, like in Malcolm X when Joe Louis wins the fight and the streets fill and the train workers can't stay mad; personal struggles become wrapped in the overarching narrative of collective experience. History is wild like that. When people like Obama conduct the thoughts of millions, those thoughts become palpable--like a living and concious entity. It's the same power that drove MLK to madness and depression.

Being there is strange because of the particularity of the experience. It's always so mundane, and so much a part of your everyday life. And yet there is something bigger.

I think God works in history. Does that conflict with the idea that God works through self discovery? I guess not, as long as it's moral and not technological/scientific discovery that is comprised by the God of history.

Make a highway, Barack.

Firm disbeliever in your punch clock promise...

He walked quickly down Fulton Street, past the train stop and on past the deli. The wind felt warm as he chattered on his phone: "Spicy Tuna, Yellowtail...30 min? Cool."
Past the Elk's church-house monstrosity, the warm wind whipped.
She walked quickly towards him, suspecting, recognizing.
He saw her underneath the bill of his hat, eyes darting quickly, giving nothing, staring off, away, washed out in the shadows.
All the neglect, the history, the past revelry and emptiness reflected in her surprised glare: surprised for her friend, not quite angry, not yet.
And she passed.
And he went to wait on his food.
And it's already Monday.

What's love got to do

When Im rippin all through your whole crew?

-BIG

Cold nights feed tension and a delusion

that somewhere

there's a pretty ass street where people pluck apples

from carts

and think deep thoughts and smoke

and live

interestingly.

Is that a poem?