A cynical impression of New York City

"We could slip away. Wouldn't that be better? Leave with nothing to say. You in your autumn sweater."

The Northeast Regional pulls outside of New York's Penn Station at 6:55am and I can hardly wait to get to Boston. We're all on the inside of the train now, and most can hardly care. The numbers of paper (paper!) Starbucks cups in hand are rivaled only by the numbers of green ties and shoes that go click-clack, like a train down the tracks of career. A New York Times is at arm's length and a neck is stretched at popped collar's length while the glasses, fully fashionable and functionally fuzz-ridding glasses, are applied mid-face to find out about forgetful forces and feel good farces.

Outside there are men who will never be outside of New York City, that keep New York City running, exercising and healthy so other men, like me, may come and go as they please. Homes, family homes with kitchen tables and armchairs step on shoulder after shoulder after shoulder and rise only to see other shoulder steppers that too are surfacing to breathe something besides piss and garbage. I heard someone say, "This is New York City. America? That's a different place all together." True? Maybe. But for sure it is New Yorkers that are all together, in this shithole.

Maybe to some, those affluent or blind or both, it's a place to behold. They can polish away the rusts of wrongness with their accumulated quilts of cold cash. There is an awful lot of defensiveness here. I know why New Yorkers are proud of their city. It's because they must be, or they'll get so goddamned depressed running into elbows, paying six dollars for milk and fending off pretentiousness that it would be unbearable. So as it is in too many places, the top of the city's food chain revels in the diversity of its primary producers, delighting in delicious and different dinners every night. Shape suiters naively tag along, bouncing from the trophic trampoline of instinct up the American dream grapevine to pop grapes like apes.

Or apples. Big apples.

This is what I see on the trains. All of them. The trains that arrive and depart the city whiz and whir past projects, ghettos, and fields of industry. Acred cement slabs of industry, occupied by men that make 500 times less than the man that put them there, to be more precise. The city trains, they rock back and forth, the same way the pangs of escape must surely sway the desires of the train riders. Again, inside these trains I see men and women that will only ever see the inside of New York City. Some have their work boots kicked into the aisles and others carry children. They are beautiful children that may someday have a chance to climb atop the torpedo, rather than having it locked on them, threatening them forever. Its only a chance, but it's a chance -- a chance counting on a chance that counts on the currents of a river of chances. Of course the beautiful children first need mom and dad to make rent this month, and the next month, and the next month...