6-25-08 I happen to prefer pop.

A thick, short black guy in a white t-shirt and a black do-rag bops along the tunnel between the shuttle and the 4/5 train, headphones buried deep in his ears. He raps along with parts of the music playing in his head: “motherfucker! Shit… and I… cut ‘em out…. Ready ta….”

This is us. We bop along locked off in our own little world, regurgitating the tapes we’ve chosen as they play over and over in our heads, barely recognizing each other, barely even aware we’re repeating the words we heard, feeling safe, thinking we’re free.

6-3-08 "Antland, Antland Over All"

Walking up the stairs from the train, the woman in front of me walks deliberately, almost gently, as if she's afraid that she might break her legs if she put down her feet too sternly.

Down in the tunnel a tall, thin, brown-skinned man playing violin watches the crowd hurry past, all of them heads bowed, scurrying through the fluorescent lit, white tiled catacombs. As I pass him, he begins playing "The Ants Go Marching Two-by-Two" and I laugh, looking around to see if anyone else notices. No even looks up, and I lope down the stairs to my transfer, giggling to myself.

6-2-08 Fathers and Sons

On the subway, the father stands, the son sits. Father says something quietly to the son, and son looks at father from under his bangs with that easy contempt that comes with adolescence, shakes his head as if he is sorry that his father, who helped bring him into the world, is such an unbelievable idiot.

Son opens his sausage bagel sandwich (no egg, no cheese, I can see the ordering process – Father: “You just want sausage? No egg? No cheese?” Son: “Daa-hd! Yes! God!”) and proceeds to deliberately separate the halves that are almost, but not quite completely, cut. His hands are small and delicate, and his father quietly watches, visibly restraining himself from reaching down and doing it for him as his son fumbles, drops half, picks it up, begins again.

5-23-08 Non-non-violence

As I walk through the long tunnel in the subway station this morning, a man wearing a blue hoodie and dark sunglasses walks against the stream of commuters walking towards Fifth Avenue.

As he passes by a man walking just in front of me, he throws his elbow out and knocks the guy sideways, and then just keeps walking, narrowly missing me, as well. The man he hit, an asian guy in a t-shirt, looks back, bewildered, before continuing on his way, and I feel sorry for him, and enraged at the asshole who hit him, to the point where I almost follow the son-of-a-bitch and knock him down, just to teach him a lesson.

Jack Kornfield, in his book A Path With Heart, suggests that many challenges in the personality will arise as one tries to calm the mind and ego, and selfishness and lust would have been my first guess for me, but the rage I've been dealing with lately has been a bit unexpected.

5-20-08 Super-size enthusiasm

The entire corner by my subway stop is cordoned off with "CAUTION" tape, and a hardhatted man with a jackhammer and a look of concentration on his face methodically tears up the sidewalk.

A girl and her little brother walk down the stairs to the subway, she in a plaid skirt and white shirt, typical school uniform, he in a blazer over white shirt and skewed tie, and he says, "They tore that building down."

"Yeah," she replies, "they tore McDonald's down."

He thinks about this as they walk through the underpass to the subway station before yelling, "I love McDonald's!"

5-19-08 Social Skills

I walk down to the G train at the Metropolitan Street station, through a long, wide hall above the platforms. A tall, lanky, bearded, vaguely homeless (shabby, but not so shabby that he might not just be an impoverished man and poor dresser with bad grooming habits) man walks down to the platform going out to Queens, and as he's about to go down the stairs, he belches.

This belch, it's a world-beater, a monster, a basso-profundo masterpiece of gastro-intestinal fortitude, literally echoing off the stone walls of the subway station. Humbled at this display, I walk downstairs to the Brooklyn side of the platform and see him across the tracks, and without breaking his stride or preparing, he lets loose another belch that resounds like the crack of doom, after which he smiles, almost proudly, and keeps walking to the end of the platform.

5-10-08 Dumbo is as Dumbo does

Katie and I wandered around Dumbo all day, following a sort of walking tour that we eventually abandoned to follow our whims and explore interesting looking streets. The park underneath Manhattan Bridge was full of people, since the sun was shining and the breeze blowing off the water was cool. A small girl, four or five years at the oldest, watched over by her daddy, was crawling on the rocks down by the waterside, and I was amazed, not at her bravery, but at his. She snaked across the rocks on all fours, occasionally standing up on very unsteady footing in her pink little shoes, wobbling there while she planned out her next move, and he calmly stood by and watched, just out of reach, letting her risk, and struggle, and almost fall, while still being close at hand, in case anything really dangerous went down.

5-8-08 Man's Best Friend

The beggar sitting in front of Key Foods lifts up his white Chinese take-out container over his head as the two dogs wander by, tails wagging, noses aflare at the wonderful smells this morning's rain has liberated. The wealthy looking (but slumming it: nice sweats, silver hair in a fashionable short, spikey cut) woman walking the dogs laughs at the man's discomfort, thinking he's in on the joke (oh, those wacky dogs, what're you gonna do?). As soon as she is away, his face, obsequious before, contorts as he mocks her clueless laughter. Yeah, it's just two dogs endearingly fucking around to her, but to him, that might be the only food he gets today, man.

5-6-08 (supplemental)

A black man on the subway dressed in sweats and straight brimmed baseball cap wears a chain around his neck. On the chain are two real twenty dollar bills folded and knotted, each end of the bill waving like a wing, and seemingly daring anyone with the guts to try and take them. It's ballsy, and I can't help but stare a little.

Also, as much as people may hate the French, you gotta love how, when they're pissed about something, they fuckin' well do something.

4-17-08 Yeah, me too, kid.

Listening on my iPod to Alan Watts talking about Zen on the way home from the grocery store after work, walking through the glorious spring day, trees budding, flowers blooming, blue sky above, moon rising straight down St. Marks, and all's right with the world. He says, "...and so the present moment suddenly expands, and it contains the whole time, all past, all present, all time. You never have to hold on to it."

I walk by the row of houses, and a little boy stands behind a steel gate, solemnly blowing bubbles between the bars and watching them sail out into the sunshine, sparkling, iridescent and lovely, until they dissolve into nothing in the air.

2-14-08 There is Nowhere That Does Not See You

A jostling tribe of Asian teenagers commandeer the 6-train car I'm riding, laughing and flirting and politely teasing each other. One of the lower-in-the-pecking-order girls (slightly less fashionably dressed, slightly less pretty) has a digital camera, and poses are posed all over the car: the shot of all their shoes, pointing together in a star, a couple of wide-eyed, goofy poses, two girls kissing the air, the ubiquitous "rock and roll" devil-horns hand-sign. As they took their dozens of pictures (always showing the subject their photo right away, eliciting either a laugh or a wince of pain, do I really look like that?), I wondered if anyone would ever look at them - so many pictures, how could they?

It suddenly came to me that the point wasn't the pictures themselves, but the act of taking them and the showing right after, a supreme self-conciousness and a constant sense of self-as-object - "This is what you look like when I see you, and aren't we having fun?"

1-22-08 Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again

A brief gale of depression and ennui derailed me from my goal, but I return, humbled, and requesting your indulgence.

I turn on the Weather Channel in the morning as I eat breakfast, and the music they play over the highs and lows for cities across the U.S. is soothing and innocuous, like elevator music. It is practically void of emotional or intellectual content, like a government report or the whirring of a ceiling fan.

A fight seems to break out on the platform as I ride the train to work, a scuffling of feet and angry voices, but as the train pulls away, the two men are walking along, smiling, shoulder to shoulder as they walk, talking like New Yorkers often talk, i.e. loudly and aggressively.

1-13-08 Flea Market

In Katie's neighborhood on the weekends, the local elementary school playground is taken over by various vendors selling their wares: minerals and jewelry, old soviet memorabilia, vintage clothes, records, old books (comic and non), the odd fedora. We walk beneath a strangely slate sky in the early afternoon (having slept in half the day from a party the night before that went well into the morning hours), say hello to the puppies we meet, and wander through the market.

I'm standing examining a sliding door armoire that I have no intention of buying, but that smells deliciously of good, aged wood, and the vendor rushes up, asking us if we think the price is too high. I explain that it isn't a price problem, but just that I didn't come to buy, and he retreats, crestfallen, while we walk away, feeling slightly guilty on what must for some reason be a "slow day".

1-12-08 angels and douchebags

The Q train on the way to Katie's place has stopped in the tunnel just before Canal Street Station because of a sick passenger in the train in front of us, and Katie and I are having to amuse ourselves with the antics of our fellow passengers as they crack under pressure.

One guy in particular is leading the pack in the douchebag olympics, a dark-skinned man in a brown hoodie who berates anyone who will listen in a thick Carribean patois. His complaints become increasingly loud and obnoxious, until, when some of his fellow passengers suggest that no one cares what he thinks, and that perhaps he should keep his mouth shut ("shut up, shut up, shut up" one fellow takes to saying over and over), he begins threatening his fellow passengers with violence in words that are barely comprehensible.

When the train finally pulls a little ways into the station, and they allow people to walk through the cars to get off the train at the front, his demeanour completely changes, and he becomes polite, deferential, letting people off ahead of him, and just generally the total opposite of what he'd been for the proceeding hour and a half.

1-3-08 Dream a little dream

A small, older Asian woman with a boyish haircut poking out from under her square hat sits on the the train while I stand, reading over her shoulder. She is very carefully examining a typewritten plot synopsis for a fantasy movie that (judging from the copyright at the bottom of the page) she or a friend of hers has written. The language is awkward and earnest, the punctuation excessive (with lots of extra exclamation points!!!), and there are pages and pages of it, each exhaustively recounting the tale of her heroine's struggle from obscurity to power and love in a land of sorcery, magical creatures, and swordplay.

A strange affection wells in me as I watch her, knowing exactly how she feels: the giddiness she feels as she reads and re-reads the pages she has worked so hard on, her certainty that this, this idea, this story, is important and worthy of attention, the way she lovingly replaces the first page on top and gently places it back into it's folder for the rest of the ride home.