Well, it's been a long hot lazy summer, and between you and me and the sticky pleather train seats, I wasn't sure the blog was going to survive. Writing a blog, it turns out, is work, and work, it turns out, sucks. So I've really been enjoying NOT writing all summer. Some of the things I have enjoyed are sleeping, playing angry birds, deleting email, and not writing my blog. I've also been making friends on the train, which it turns out is kind of nice. These ARE NOT the kind of friends that you see on the platform and silently beg to sweet jesus that they don't sit with you so you won't have to "make conversation" for 65 grinding minutes. These are really decent, salt of the earth seasoned commuters who are smart and funny and real and they make me...what's the word I'm looking for...? Happy. And we all know the blog has no place in a happy commute. The blog is about misery and disappointment and futility and hopelessness and it is most certainly not about enjoying your friends. A happy blog is a boring blog.
So just when I think I might be done with the blog forever, just when I think I've been saved by my new friends and this new feeling I call happy, I'm jolted back into the harsh flourescent light of reality by two pairs of nasty ass feet up on a seat. Need I repeat? Two feet on a seat! One foot, two foot, three foot, four! Dump those shoes right on the floor! But wait, it's not just feet, it's feet and meat! Four feet and the meat that they bought on the street! How neat! (Actually, it's leftover tappas, but tappas doesn't rhyme with feet). Two prize Westchester hens, fresh off an afternoon of spending their allowances and guzzling chocolate martini's plop their pudgy, calloused, un ped-egged feet onto the precious real estate of a seat on my 6:29 peak train. Like they effing own the place. Like they're home on their sofa rubbing the lint and sweat out from between those toes and there's not a soul around. Except there are plenty of souls on my deadly serious, we-all-effing-work-for-a-living-and-now-it's-going-home-time peak hour train. And we souls shouldn't have to spend 65 minutes trying not to look at your naked effing feet.
And suddenly I'm awake. I'm enraged and alive and energized and bursting at the seams. Im sitting here, staring into a seatful of feet and meat and toes and woes, and I feel the familiar rumblings of a blog coming on, coming on strong like a freight train or a good bm. Because no matter how many friends I may make and no matter how much happiness tries like a strong worm to wriggle its way into my life, the enduring misery and indignities and smells and rudeness and absurdities of my commute will always beat it back down the hole it crawled out of. No happines in the world can win out over three and a half hours a day, five days a week, 52 weeks a year, year after year of riding this effing train. And if I have to watch my life slowly tick away into a big empty pit of blackness, minute by minute for the rest of eternity, well I'm damn well going to do my best to drag you down with me.
The blog is back. Long live the blog.
