The Subway Ride

Posted 9:08 AM by sean
My least favorite part of yesterday? Going to the DMV for the third time. Second to that? Getting food poisoning and barfing for an hour. Yes, the DMV is worse than being sick.

I know there is no way I will be able to describe this subway ride that will be as good as actually being there, but let me start by at least setting the scene.

Directly in front of me, at the end of one of those long benches, is a hindu or a sikh or something, (what do I know from God?) who is wearing a business suit and an overcoat, but peaking out from the sleeves of his pants and suit coat is one of those pale pink scrubs material prayer outfits and in the center of his forehead is a red smudge, like on ash wednesday but red. He is reading a small book and muttering prayers. He does nothing else in this story but take up *way* more room than he should for a man who is about five foot five.

Next to him is a sort of Jewish faux Sex-In-The-City type, small chested, small wasted, small assed, who is reading a woman's magazine. Between her feet on the floor of the subway is one of those boutique shopping bags, see-through soft crinkly plastic with not very much in it, but propped open.

Next to her, but sitting about a half-person's length away, is a ghetto fabulous black woman, gorgeous, hair dyed in strips of brass, blonde and brown and wearing those rimless sunglasses that are dark up by her eyebrows and fade to clear by her nose. She's wearing a suede jacket with a huge fur collar over her tight earth tone outfit ending in suede patchwork high heel knee high boots.

I'm on the other side, listening to, I'm not lying, opera on my ipod. Next to me is a girl, and next to the girl is her mother.

The girl is right around three years old, she's sort of walking without much help, but she didn't talk the whole time we were on the train. She was latina, but I only knew that from her mom, she could have been native American or Chinese, she was just gorgeous. Round face, piercing huge dark round eyes - her entire leg was just shy of the length of my femur, she spent most of the ride sliding down the seat and the pushing herself back up.

When she got on, she sat on the bench and spent the next three or four minutes gazing deeply into her mother's face. It was an unsettling gaze, a hard questioning gaze, and I know because I was next. She flashed her gaze on me while I was giggling at her, and there was no accusation in her eyes, but *research*. I have a terrible memory, especially for faces, and I can remember her eyes *exactly*, like they've left that flashbulb trace when your eyes are closed.

The ride continues, and the music swells in my headphones and at the next stop, a young man gets on the train. Ghetto-fabulous lady is checking her cell-phone... wait, we're in the subway, you can't check your cellphone... it turns out, she's checking her reflection in the turned-off cellphone's face plate. She likes what she see and puts the phone away.

The young man is holding a large backpack, and he's a normal sized guy, but he still tries to fit in the half-person spot between Ghetto-Fab and Sex-In-The-City. He shuffles his ass in between them, which only makes the praying man with his arms and legs spread out look more ridiculous.

The three year old is interested in none of this. She is looking past me out the back window of the train. There is a blue light there. She decides it's fine and goes back to looking at her feet. The train leaves

The backpack kid starts opening and closing different pouches on his bag. He's *shuffling*, and the ladies around him aren't used to being shuffled outside, y'know, the club. This kid looks like he's one step too creepy and one step too handsome to be a close friend of mine, he'd be just on the outside of my closest friends, but he'd still be someone I knew. He's too young, but he looks like he's got some art-related business to peddle.

The girl next to me is staring at me, but playing with the tiny balls that run along the bottom of her pink shawl. She has on pink socks and polished black shoes.

The group in front of me is perfect New York. No-one cares about ehtnicity or religion, they care about space. Space is all we are really fighting for. In Isreal, if it was three times as big with half the people, there wouldn't be as much a problem. In New York, we just need a coupla million people to move and we'll be better.

A bad negotiation for backpack boy and suddenly, disaster. Out of one of the pockets a yellow legal paper slides out, and out of the folded yellow legal paper, about thirty polaroids dump out on to the floor of the subway.

I told Mac and Jordana this story, and I loved the look on their faces. "Polaroid" means only one thing. As Mac said, "polaroids are pictures you don't want the kid at the 24-hour developing place to look at." If I told you that a guy was carrying around a stack of polaroids in an envelope, that would mean something to you.

I didn't see all of them. But the ones I saw were just people, some laughing, some making silly faces, and some pulling shirts up slightly, like the beginnings of a striptease.

Here's the thing, the fell out, not just on the ground, but also into the see through bag of the Sex-In-The-City girl, and the kid started picking them up *way* before anyone had a chance to even process what had happened, in a nervous frenzy.

This guy had private porn spilling into the subway? Holy crap, this was just terrible for this kid, humiliating. The Sex-In-The-City girl was trying to help him get his pictures out of her bag, and they were sort of shoving each other's hands away because the kid didn't want this lady to have the pictures, but this lady didn't want this kid's hands all up in her shit. Ghetto-Fabulous blew an enormous bubble.

I turned to look at the little girl.

She was staring, right up at me, her beautiful eyes burning right into my heart and her hand, which had reached out to my jacket to steady her during the last turn, was pulling my wallet slowly out of my pocket.

Her mother saw this and was mortified, and started saying something to her, those quiet condemnations that lovely mothers give their children in *really* embarassing situations, and I sat there and laughed and tried not to lose the staring contest the girl was having with me. Lips in full pout, eyes completely on mine, she struggled to get my wallet free of my pocket. Her mother finally reached across and pulled the girl's hand away, just as my stop came up.

I mean, I only had about five bucks in there. The ride was worth way more than that.

Defeatist

Posted 3:05 PM by sean
There is a great story about my subway ride today, which hopefully I will write and post later. My friend Bud. basically stopped blogging for a few weeks during which I'm guessing he was gathering himself for the coming storm. My nephew Sean Patrick is preparing himself for largely the same thing.

What the hell are we supposed to do? In my mind, this presidency has gone from one that supported things I don't and pursued paths I wouldn't, to a group of people who are hell-bent on destroying the ideals that our nation was founded on. I'm not hyperbolizing, look at the list...

Stolen election. Granting Haliburton contracts to rebuild Iraq before the war started. Scalia duck hunting with Cheney (which when taken with their claim about Rice's testimony being an infringement of the separation of powers particularly ironic.) Lying to the American people about WMD in Iraq. Huge recess appointments of far right wing justices. Constitutional ban on gay marriage. Blacks being barred from voting in Florida, protestors being denied access to those in power... They are systematically taking apart the aspects of America that are most American.

That is in addition to the normal Republican things that trigger me, plus a littany of particularly Bush-ist problems. Prioritizing Star Wars missile defense. Lies about Uranium in Niger going to Iraq. Massive terrorist attacks in Europe as a direct retaliation of the war in Iraq, more people killed by Al Qaeda since September 11th than in the eight years Clinton was in office... Every day there is something else. School was cancelled in Boston so Bush could have a fundraiser there... and yet...

And yet... None of this matters. It occured to me today that Kerry's just, y'know, nothing. He got the nomination because the Democrats want to win, and even a bad actor can tell you, if you have the wrong intention, you aren't going to do a good job. He is a follower, and most of the time he doesn't even know what he's following.

I'm gonna vote against Bush, and when I pull the lever or push the punch card, I'm gonna do it *really* hard. But it won't matter. I was never gonna vote for Bush. However, if McCain were running against Kerry, I might vote Republican.

This election is the Democrats' to loose. And they are going to. No-one has any reason to vote for Kerry.

God, I hope I'm wrong.

Stones

Posted 8:33 PM by sean
A year after someone dies, they unveil the headstone. In the Jewish faith, that is, you wait one year and then you inveil the headstone, which should, I guess, be the end of the mourning, or at least the beginning of the end of the mourning.

Today, we had the unveiling for Jordana's grandmother, who was buried a year ago. A year ago, there was driving snow and we had the awkward attempts at sideways umbrellas and people trying to be there for other people harder than they were trying to deal with their own shit.

It's tough to know how to deal with death. I went to a funeral about eight years ago, the funeral of my girlfriend's father's mother. It was the kind of family that was a balancing act between terrific egos completely self absorbed, and desperate hangers-on that tried to placate the others in order to find their identity.

I didn't quite fit in on either side, and the funeral was the beginning of the end of that relationship. My girlfriend wept epic tears and berated me for not being there for her more, but even better was her father and his wife. The father reverently, and for all to see, bent down and kissed the urn that contained the ashes, but his wife, the step-daughter to this woman who disliked her and whom she disliked, was caught between not wanting to be there at all and wanting to show the proper respect to her husband. So, instead of walking away, and instead of kissing the urn, she kissed her fingers and smacked the top of the urn, almost like a high five.

Today, there was a different dynamic. Everyone here would rather be helpful than helped. Jordana's aunt said, "It's a shame that she won't be here this summer, we have three weddings and she would have loved this.", that was really the extent of anyone crying out for help. The rabbi led the group, about twenty of us, and then at the end he turned to Aunt Cherie and said, "it isn't a shame she won't be there, the weddings are a testimony to her." and he just looked at her until she smiled.

I have a lot of thoughts, always, about the fact that my children will have to figure out what they want to do about their jewishness. As the rabbi prayed, Jordana said the prayer under her breath, in Hebrew, a prayer that almost no-one else there knew. She's admitted to me that she may become more Jewish as the years go by, and I'm prepared for the changes that will take place, no matter what direction.

But in the middle of the day, the year after the driving snow, as the Rabbi spoke, the sun came out and warmed the back of Jordana's black jacket and the flat of my hand on the small of her back, and I heard Jordana's grandfather, as he stared at the blank half of the stone that bore his wife's name and waited for his, I heard him whisper to Aunt Cherie "don't worry. She'll be there."