7 dis-[function] sets

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The train has its delays one the one day I’ve planned things a little too tightly to tolerate such dawdling. What happens to all these Red trains that I always see leaving the station religiously every five minutes when I’m stuck at Howard waiting for a Purple one? How is it that by the time one gets to Belmont and is trying to catch a Red train they only seem to come every fifteen minutes? What happens? Does some monster eat half of the trains?

Don’t forget to get off at the next stop. I get up to wait by the door as we glide past a local station. People stand about in coats and hats under the rusty red “Wellington” sign. Too bad that no one at the Wellington platform actually wears Wellingtons.
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Somehow, with my somewhat clumsy but sensible and comfy shoes, I manage to take this woman’s pump off her left foot. I’m part of the rush of people getting off the train, flooding down the stairs and draining out into the street. She’s one of those bodies trying to push upward to wait in the frigid air for transportation. We pass each other and somehow my shoe catches her little pump, sending it flying. I apologize profusely and bend down to pick up the cheap little black shoe and put it back onto her foot. She does not turn into a princess.
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I’m walking up the street, just meeting someone for the first time over coffee (even though I don’t drink coffee) at a little place that caught my eye 3 years ago. Hard to forget a place with “pig” in the title. Everyone else is walking the other direction. Their faces are so young! They look terribly tidy and terribly ready to face the world. Young men. As I pass them some turn their heads to look at me. Fast, though, so they don’t get caught. There’s something funny in the air today – as if suddenly people will halt their march into the job machine, turn, open their jackets to reveal saffron robes, and break into unison singing. “Cha’i guru deva – OHMMMMM - Nothing's gonna change my world...”
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Everyone is at a table by themselves when I get there. I play pick-the-single for a second or two. But, he’s easy to spot. Profile just like the picture that I’ve been looking at as I typed out emails for the past week. He’s hunched over the Wall Street Journal in the same way he slumps over a dog in one of the online photos. But this isn’t online. This is the real person who will have a real inflection to discern when he says words that he, until now, he would have typed. Here sits the mind and the meat suit. Hello person named after a sharp object, nice to meat you.

When someone who reads the Journal hands you his business card, it means he wants to talk again. I realize that 40 minutes after we part ways on a traffic island to head off to respective jobs.
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P~ the computer addict sneaks around the corner of my cubicle, with a barely concealed glee.
“There’s a new baby Mac in my house!”

“Really?” I roll around my chair dramatically and make a flourish with my arm. “How many does this make?

“Five!” He’s beaming like a new dad.

“Five? What, are you guys, Catholic?”
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I’m walking down the street toward the annual anal raping I take at the accountant. How does one profession manage to magnetize the most bland, monotone, individuals on earth? What happened to people like that before there was a need for accountants? Did they hang out in barns counting sheaves?

Preacher man is on his same corner where he has stood as long as I’ve lived in this city and walked past this corner. He rants into his karaoke machine in front of the Old Navy telling all of the teenagers eager to exercise the credit cards they shouldn’t have about how they ‘Canna go to heaven if they drinkin' liquor! You can’t get to heaven with a cigarette in your hand!’ The lecture goes on to talk about Jesus. Jesus this Jesus that. I look up a bit. One block down is the brownstone with bay windows where I lived for two summers. I count up 12 floors and spot the window that used to be mine. That room, that solitude, was heaven. I had a lot of great sex in that room while preacher man ranted below under the hot sun on a concrete griddle. I pass him, his pointing finger and cheap loudspeaker, with a big ole’ grin on my face.
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Don’t forget, never forget, to see something good in every person you pass. Imagine them as a good secretary, a kind voice on someone’s phone, something good to someone somewhere. That black girl with the high leather boots that are a bit too industrial to be sexy and the face that’s too round and teenage pimply to be pretty, she’s doing the best she can even though she looks so cold and tired. I see her. I see her trying to be someone, not just another nothing person disregarded for her skin color or thick lips. She’s just beautiful, really. I smile at that beauty I see in her and when she looks at me the coldness and tiredness, the youthful frustration, melts from her face for a second and she smiles back.
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