T<\/span>he other night I was going to have dinner with a friend in Brooklyn.\u00a0 It had been awhile since I was on the subway at rush hour, packed in with my arm straight up holding the metal thingy, my bag scrunched between my feet to make room.<\/p>\n

It was more uncomfortable than I remembered.\u00a0 Except for my rush hour memory of a guy trying to secretly hump me from behind when I was nineteen.\u00a0 I definitely remember that as being uncomfortable.\u00a0 I give him credit for trying to be\u00a0surreptitious and gentle, but really, I think we both knew he was kidding himself about how little hump pressure it takes to let someone know they\u2019re being humped.\u00a0 It\u2019s almost none.<\/p>\n

I really love the subway, and in LA I missed it a lot.\u00a0 I took the bus for a while in LA, and I liked the fact that everyone on it was considered to be a loser just by virtue of being on the bus.\u00a0 Like for everyone else in their bullshit earth-hating Hummer cars, just SEEING the bus go by, and just SEEING people waiting for the bus, bummed them out.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s like those new airlines that are all business class.\u00a0 It\u2019s one thing to hate coach and want to fly business \u2013 it\u2019s another to hate the very IDEA of coach so badly that it ruins your flight just to see anyone else getting on coach.\u00a0 So I liked the bus in that way.<\/p>\n

<\/a> But it still wasn\u2019t like the subway.\u00a0 I like the jumble of everyone being on the subway.\u00a0 Everyone having to see everyone else twice a day\u2014having a little group hang out time.\u00a0 We might all end up hating each other, but at least the hate is rooted in some visuals.\u00a0 They don\u2019t have to be reasonable: I hate that guy\u2019s face.\u00a0 I hate that guy\u2019s hat.\u00a0 I hate those loud kids.\u00a0 I hate that woman who looks dumb.<\/p>\n

There are real details to back up the hate, as opposed to in LA, where everyone just drives around hating people in the abstract.\u00a0 People who may or may not be wearing hats.\u00a0 Who may or may not be looking dumb.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s the way your soul can stretch a bit on the subway.\u00a0 Just because you have the time and there\u2019s nothing else to do.\u00a0 Yeah.\u00a0 Your fucking soul.<\/p>\n

Like sometimes I\u2019ll do the thing where I look around and try to remember that everyone on the train was once a baby.\u00a0 That\u2019s a good exercise to do every once in awhile.\u00a0 To look for the ghost of someone\u2019s baby face in their current face.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s like those illusion posters where you have to stare really hard to see the dinosaur or the unicorn or whatever. (I have never once found the unicorn or the dinosaur.\u00a0 I fucking hated those posters.)<\/p>\n

The other thing I\u2019ll do is look and\u00a0try to guess\u00a0who\u2019s married.\u00a0 I\u00a0look at someone and then I look to see if they have a ring on.\u00a0 Here\u2019s the lesson you learn from this game:\u00a0 it\u2019s a crapshoot.\u00a0 Wanna get married?\u00a0 Time to get thin and beautiful.\u00a0 Or wait a second \u2013 hold on \u2013 maybe you better get started being fat and hideous.<\/p>\n

It seems it\u2019s\u00a0primarily the people filling out the middle who are ringless \u2013 the average, the just fine, the just OK.\u00a0 Perhaps proving what Picasso said (or was it Matisse?) about how That which is ugly can be beautiful, but that which is pretty will never be beautiful<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Actually, it doesn\u2019t prove that at all.\u00a0 I think what it proves is, I am the creepiest person on the train, always.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I like the jumble of everyone being on the subway<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2059"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2059\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2143,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2059\/revisions\/2143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}