Underground

Well, I didn’t go out last night to drink away my woes, actually I stayed in and watched Gilmore Girls and bitched about being tired. Good thing, too, because I needed time to sit on the couch and think before a good, long sleep. What did I think about, you may wonder, well, I’m going to tell you…I thought about the subway.

Yes, the dirty, loud, crowded subway. Now, I’m all for public transport, and the first few times on the train were kind of a new adventure as we tunneled to the center of the earth, (very Jules Verne-like). Not sure where we would end up, or if the stop was even the correct one. But then, then, I began to look around a little and realized I was on a train that could be a hundred years old, OK, not that old, but old and rusty none-the-less. On a semi-old, rusty, train, without a visible driver, hurtling through small, dark tunnels, on tracks that, well, let’s face it, exactly how often are rails checked in the dank recesses of the earth?

The trains do not seem all that stable to me, they rock dangerously back and forth, screech through sharp turns, and go way too fast under the river…wait, under the river? I’d almost forgotten that fun part, where the old, rusty, driver-less, train, on old, un-inspected tracks, careening on the edge of disaster, actually plunges deep enough to ford a river. Didn’t they make a movie on something like that? Where people get stuck in some deep, underground tunnel and the body of water above seeps through to drown them? I think it had Sylvester Stallon in it…anyway, my point is it’s unsafe, and kind of scary. I’m all up for adventure and all, just not deep, deep underground with no lights, strange homeless underground people, and impending, watery doom. I mean, some people like that kind of thing, or rather, movie and TV characters do. Well, maybe they don’t like like it, but they have all kinds of fun adventures discovering strange creatures and saving worlds like in the TV StarGate where they tunnel down to stop some kind of explosion. Still, I’m not on that side of the screen, so all and all, not fun.

That might be enough to dissuade me from riding the trains, but wait, there’s more! As some of you may or may not know, I’m from the wide-open spaces in the west. I don’t like small spaces into which large volumes of humanity are smashed together. It doesn’t smell good, feel good, or improve one’s mood after a long day at work. And, oh the horror, of realizing, too late, you got home and popped a chip in your mouth before washing your hands after a ride on the train, ick!!

Then there’s Chambers Street. This strange street, or should I say, vortex, appears before my work stop. Somehow, it’s always there when you least expect it, looming, ready to eat precious minutes you need to get to work. Always unexpected, and dangerously tempting to the tired passenger who might step outside the train, too late they realize they’ve left the relative safety of the rusty, rickety transport, and entered a foreign domain.

That’s what happens when I think, that whole tirade happens…just wait till I write about what I dream, know that is one scary, crazy place!