Monday, January 16, 2006

Ridding the metro. I am riding the metro, but this time, for the first time I am writing on a computer while riding the blue metro. Life has funny ways to surprise us, I would’ve never guessed I would one day do this, write in the metro. I’ve been using the blue beast for years, probably16. It has come to symbolise entire periods of my life. I am used to it, comfortable on one side of it, the west one, and I am itchy and weary on the east side. The people there are different, and the stations are different. I don’t know them, I don’t know where the exits are, which streets they lead to, which buses are waiting outside the stations. I don’t know how the houses and the street lamps look around these stations, and I usually avoid them, as if I was in another city. And the people, they are different on the other sides of the same lines. There is definitely a weird dynamic in the people that ride the metro. From one side they usually ride only up to a certain point, everyone’s common destination, usually downtown. And from downtown the other, different set of people, the ones I don’t know, get in and ride to their destinations on the east sides of the metro. And at one point of their day these same people rode from their stations to downtown, but I don’t know that, cause I never do it.

The metro, I often think of it as a blue worm, crawling in the depths of the belly of our city, sheltering us from the cold, the snow, the rain and the heat and allowing us to go where we want to, but that’s only a limited sub-set of the city, and it’s the one I know the most actually.

Often, I also think of what a person from past times would think, beamed into the future somehow, and dropped in the metro. Would the loud sounds frighten them, would the speed and the dark concrete tunnels scare them? I think they would, cause they scare me, yet I am used to the metro. The metro is the monster that modern urban environment has created; it’s a train underground. Think about it, how ugly is the idea; a train running underground. There is so much above ground that we can’t even put a train in the open anymore. We need to dig, hide under the surface, and feel good and safe down there. In futuristic sc-fi movies humans are often depicted living underground. That’s not the future my friend, it’s already here, it has already started, and we accept it without paying any attention to it. Yes, the metro is underground, and that’s it, that’s how it has always been and how it always will be.

Today was a messed up day. Starting last night actually, 24 hours ago, it’s been a messed up day. It was has hard on me and I probably bleached a couple more hairs, yet today I feel like writing, I had this urge to write about the metro. Again, I am sad and tired, very sad and very tired. Like Led Zep said, I miss my winter, I never thought I’d see it go. I think I am used to my winter. Or am I? No that’s bull shit, I hate my winter and I am not happy during my winter. But I write during my winter, maybe cause it helps. I hope I don’t write too often anymore.

And there it is, a bird flying free in this fuckin ugly concrete monstrously large hole in the ground. Nature once again laughs at us, there is noting it can’t conquer, nothing we can take that it can’t reclaim. One day this hole will be filled and saved by nature, and there is nothing we can do to stop that. It’s as certain as death, it’s inevitable.
These birds always flabbergast me, like that bird inside the airport in Cincinnati. There is something so powerful about being able to fly freely inside something humans have build, with the sole purpose of shielding ourselves from the outside. Well the outside wants in, and it got in, in our face.

Comments: Post a Comment



<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?