Mr. Tiny TV Man

Hello Mr. Tiny TV man! I wonder to myself, what do you watch on your tiny TV? What is it that you see on that tiny little screen? Do you watch SNL shorts? Tiny Tots cartoons? Little House on the Prairie? Wee-man? Bugs Life? Gulliver's Travels? Honey I Shrunk the Kids? Could you really enjoy anything so tiny? Can you appreciate the nuance of an expression? The subtle eyebrow lift of a flirtatious leading lady? Nope. You can't see that on that tiny TV. Do you watch hockey? No way dude, do you watch hockey. Tiny puck is way too tiny. I can barely see that puck on my big boy TV. Do you watch a tiny little Yankees games? Do they play small ball? Again I say now way dude. Was it fair or foul? Can't tell. Too tiny. Can you read the scroll at the bottom of the news. I doubt it. I would imagine that the type would be, how shall I say, too tiny. John and Kate plus 8? Nope. Too many tiny kids. Tiny YouTube? Way too tiny. Can you hit the tiny share button on the tiny YouTube video? No you can not sir. Tooooooo tiny. Tiny porn? I doubt it. Too teeny peenie. Way to teeny a peenie to be seenie. Tiny video game? Teeny Wii? Little teeny Wii golf? No no no. Too small a golf ball says I. Too small a ball. Tiny spongebob? Tiny Homer? Tiny Greta Van Susteren? Tiny Simon Cowell? Teeny Charlie Sheeny? I have no idea. Whatever it is that you watch on your teeny tiny TV though, I do know that it must be good, because you've been watching that effing teeny TV for 30 minutes. Time for an iPad dude. Time for an iPad.

April Showers

About 40 feet above the underground train platform, somewhere on Park Avenue I imagine, the lightly falling spring rain is collecting in pools on the street. It mixes there with all the other things that share the streets of Gotham. Things like tubercular loogies and motor oil and dog feces and mop water and cigarette butts and spilled breakfast burritos and the collective lost hopes and dreams of 8 million souls. It cozies up with all the other infectious diseases and bodily fluids until it becomes one with the repulsive gumbo of Manhattan street water, at which point it continues on its journey. It follows the natural flow of the street until it finds a gutter to fall into, where I imagine it spills into a whole new level of decomposing detritus. Dead rats and old tampons and illegally tossed batteries and medical waste and chewed tobacco, and it is here, on this level, that it begins to take on the low light glow of radioactive material. And now, with its new lethal powers, it eats its way through the cracks of the 150 year old infrastructure of the city, past the electrical tunnels and the sewage pipes and the long buried teamster, until it finally squeezes through a microscopic pore in the ceiling of the north end of Grand Central station and lands on my head just before I reach the safety of the platform exit. It hits my head, crawls through my scalp and slowly trickles down the side of my face, just missing my eye and nearly reaching the corner of my mouth before I wipe it off with the defeated look of a guy who gave up caring about this kind of thing many years ago, and I think to myself...shit, I forgot my umbrella.

Fly Guy

Friday had all the makings of a great commute. Beautiful sunny day, left work early so I could ride home and actually look out the window of the train, got the window seat facing an empty seat so I could really spread out and relax, which is exactly what I did. I slouched way down in the seat, spread my legs wide and settled in. This is the kind of ride you actually look forward to. Comfortable, civilized, a gift really. A gift from the train gods. In fact I got so comfortable that I fell asleep for about a half hour, and when I woke up there were two women sitting around me, one in the seat across the aisle and one in the seat on a diagonal across from me. I also noticed that, because I was wearing a nice suit with a delicate italian zipper, evidently when I sat down and spread my legs apart, my zipper unzipped itself, exposing my lovely baby blue Hanes underwear ( I buy them in colorful discount sets from Kohl's. Yeah, I really do) to my new guests , who no doubt thought I was drunk or just really bad at flirting. Turns out the commuting gods were not smiling on me that day. Turns out they were just setting me up, which is par for the course. So today's lesson is an obvious one, and yet it's one I never seem to learn. When things seem like they are going really good for once, that for one brief beautiful shining moment life is actually working out in your favor, don't trust it. Chances are, your barn door's open, the neighbors are peeking in and the gods are laughing their effing asses off.

Gum Bomb

Warning: This post contains language that may not be suitable for younger readers, but that hopefully adds just the right amount of emphasis at the appropriate moment.

When my train pulls into Grand Central in the morning, we’re almost always on the same track, track 24, and when I get off the train, I go out the north exit, which is to say the ass end of Grand Central. Most people go out the front end, the wide open end, where you stroll through the main station room with the majestic vaulted ceiling like effing Fred Astair, and you just know you’re going to have a good day. That’s not the way I go. I go out the ass. The part that most people don’t see. The part with leaky ceilings, poor lighting and perennially empty Metro North schedule bins. And when you go out the ass on track 24, you have to stand in a long line with the other ass enders and wait your turn to squeeze through the small little single door exit that faces backwards (a sadistic touch of engineering) at the end of the track platform. Just another one among hundreds of commuting indignities that I’m forced to suffer. I start my day by being shat out the ass of Grand Central.

So every day I stand in the line, waiting to pop out the other side, and almost every day, somebody cuts the line. It’s usually a guy (surprise), and he’s definitely the kind of guy who doesn’t do lines. A non linear guy. A maverick. A renegade. Actually, a douchebag. He slithers along the yellow studded warning strip that lines the edge of the platform until he reaches the front of the line, and just when he gets to the door, he looks at his Blackberry as if he just got the worlds most effing important email, and he pounds through.

Now this is the world I live in and I expect no apologies. It’s the commuter world, warts and all, and I know just as well as the next guy, that it can bring out the worst in people. So I don’t hold it against the cutter. He’s just taking his place in the never-ending circle of hell that is my daily commute. He’s like the guy who goes into prison a garden variety tax cheat and comes out a white supremacist. Ride this train long enough and eventually one day you’ll be a dick. It just wears you down.

Plus he probably has a reason. We all have reasons, right? Im sure his older brother laughed at his penis or his wife holds the remote or his mom didn’t breast feed him or his kids de-friended him or he’s gone as high as he’s going to go among the lemmings of middle managers at his company, and so this is his moment. This all he’s got, man. Which is kind of sad when you think about it. Eff the line! Eff waiting my turn! Today, right now, for just this one glorious moment, I am going to stand up and be a douchebag! I am going to cut to the head of the ass-enders line and get shat out into the world 1 minute and 25 seconds sooner than the rest of you losers!

And that’s cool. I get it. Law of the jungle and all that. You live by the rule of the commute. But you also die by it. And so this morning, when a guy cut in front of me in line, I simply took my gum out of my mouth and dropped it into his open briefcase, right on top of his Wall Street effing Journal. Point set and match motherfucker. See you tomorrow.

Get Up, Stand Up

First, on the advice of my attorneys, I will be employing the black bar method of disguising the identity of some of the people in my pictures, not really because Im afraid of getting sued, because a train is a public space, and as such, there is no expectation of privacy (i just made that up), but mainly because in this particular case, I showed this picture to a friend of mine and they delightfuly squealed, "Hey, I know that woman". And if my friend knows them, then chances are they live near me and chances are they can hunt me down, so in the interest of safety, mainly my own, I'm bringing out the black bar.

On to it, then.

There are a lot of people who ride the train who simply refuse to sit bitch, that is, refuse to sit in the middle of a three seater between two other riders. I suspect its a whole too touchy too close personal space kind of thing, especially first thing in the morning. Before your day even starts, you just dont want someone all up in your bidness eating breakfast or cranking their music or bumping elbows while they turn the page of their Wall Street Journal (hurry up iPad). Those folks tend to get on the train kind of late, so they dont have as far to ride, and they usually chose to stand, or sit on the floor in the doorway. It's not really that bad. You just lean there and look out the window for a half hour and your there.

So standing or sitting on the floor are the two most common approaches to avoiding the uncomfortable feeling of touching another person. Turns out there is a third one which I didnt know about. Seems you can stand up at your seat, turn backwards facing the other riders, and scowl for 30 minutes, which is what this woman did. I kept wondering if she as looking for a friend, or an enemy, or a conductor, or happiness, or fulfillment, or a reason to keep going on. But she was standing for too long, so it didnt make sense. Maybe she had that shaky leg thing that you get when you cant sleep, or bad circulation like on planes when if you dont walk around every hour you can get a blood clot and die. But she wasn't stretching or moving around at all. Just standing like a statue. A really pissed off statue. So what else could it be? It had to be that she just didnt want to touch the person in the seat next to her. Now in all fairnes, I couldnt see the person in the seat next to her, so its possible that this person was so repugnant that even the idea of sitting next to them was too horrible to imagine, but then why not go stand next to some other person, or even sit next to them? I still don't know why this happened, and I havent seen her since, so I dont know if this was a one time occurrence or whether this was just how she enjoys riding the train. Either way, she's just one more person on one more train ride of a lifetime of train rides that doesn't make any effing sense. It's unnerving spending hours and hours of your life in a place that more often than not doesn't make sense. Where people just do weird random things that can't be explained. Like when people bark like dogs for no reason, or root for the Mets year after year, or go to New Jersey on vacation.

Next time I see her, I'll offer her my seat and see what happens. My guess is she'll accept it gratefully, move over to where I was sitting, and stand there staring into the train car. And I'll have to switch to her seat...and sit bitch.

An Apology

I'd like to apologize to a woman who was riding the Harlem Line 5:59 peaker last night. Here's why...

Chapter 1: Sockit Tumi

I bought a new briefcase yesterday, a sleek black Tumi briefcase, probably made out of recycled six packs and old goodyear radials, which makes it indestructable, which is cool because i dont want to have to drop another $250 on a briefcase for at least 5 more years, or until the effing recession ends, whichever comes first. And this new briefcase is much smaller and narrower than my old briefcase, because I'm such an obsessive compulsive a-hole that I firmly believe every extra ounce of weight and wind resistance I lug around makes me a less efficient commuter. I like to travel light. No coat in winter, no umbrella for rain, no books, no food, no newspapers, no effing extra weight. If i thought it would help to go with a full on Michael Phelps body shave "smoothie", I'd do that, if it meant knocking 20 seconds off my crosstown walk (plus I bet the missus wouldn't mind either. holla!). So now I have a bag with a really nice "profile", as the affected bag people would say, but i still have the same amount of crap to carry as I used to, so its packed tighter than a rush hour F train...

Chapter 2: The Rotten Apple

Last week my 14 year old daughter's Macbook laptop up and died. It didnt even have the ram to muster up a good old fashion screen freeze or spinning effing rainbow wheel. It just wouldn't turn on. I can't really blame it. After three years of sharpie marker tags, nail polished keys, glitter stickers, drops, spills, kicks,and sleepovers, I suspect it just said eff it and shut down for good. Which left it up to me to figure out how to get the three years worth of music, photos, journal entries and video chat screen grabs off of our dearly departed Mac in order to preserve the precious digital memories of my daughters transition from innocent child to hormonal effing devil. So I did what any smart dad would do, I took it into my IT department and asked them to work their magic, which they did...

Chapter 3: Ooooh. That's Gonna Leave a Mark

Time to bring home the laptop, but because I am now a streamlined commuting airfoil, there's no room in my fancy new bag to store it, so I have to carry it, and when I get on the 5:59 peaker heading home, I decide that the best place to store the laptop is on the overhead rack. Are you starting to figure it out now? Thaaats right, as I was getting ready to get off at my stop, I reached up to get the laptop, and that fat little 13" white plastic brick slipped right through the 3" spaced bars of the overhead rack and landed on the head of the sleeping woman in front of me. Suddenly awake and very surprised, she let out an audible gasp, something like "aahhhh! What the..." and she doubled over in pain in her seat. I picked up the laptop, which had slid down behind her, which meant i had to reach down in the vicinity of her ass and grab the thing, which no doubt added a whole new level of humiliation and confusion to an already awkward situation, and then I tried my best to apologize. Round about my 5th or 6th "holy shit, are you OK?" she finally sat upright, and in her lap, much to my horror was an open copy of the book "What to Expect When Your Expecting". That's right, I just dropped a 5 pound plastic cinder block onto the head of a pregnant woman. One express ticket to hell please. Whats that? No, I don't believe I'll need a return ticket. Pretty sure I'll be staying.

So with really nothing else to do but say I was sorry over and over and over, I braced for the inevitable. I mean, I've seen people get into fist fights on trains over phone calls and spilled coffee. What would a pregnant woman with a concussion and an angry mob on her side do? She stopped for a second and took a breath. "It's OK." she said. "Really. I'll be fine. I know it was an accident and I'm sure you didn't mean to do that." and then she touched my hand which was resting on the back of her seat and in a voice that could only belong to an angel she said "Really. Dont worry about it".

So lady, if you're out there somewhere reading this, I just want you to know two things. One is that I am truly truly sorry for what I did and if I ever see you again on the train, I will gladly let you drop the heavy object of your choice on my head as payback. At the very least, leave your email on the blog and I'll send you some flowers or a bottle or something. Oh, and the other thing I wanted to say was you will almost certainly be the world's most awesome mom.

Shout Outs and Blogrolls

Remarkably, or I guess not so remarkably, it turns out I'm not the only person who likes to kill time while he commutes by writing a blog...about commuting. I recently got emails from two like minded souls who found my blog and reached out. One of them is Mike, who writes Trainjotting. If you want to know what a real blog looks like, with ads and updates and all sorts of impressive looking stuff, well, take a look at Mike's site. It's what my blog wants to be when it grows up. Plus, I enjoy Mike's slightly dark and Cheever-esque take on life on the rails. It appeals to my glass is half empty sensibility. Finally, Mike told me what a blogroll is (look to your right...) so in my book, he's a standup guy.

The other person is Emily, who has an even more professional looking site called I Ride The Harlem Line. This is what my blog wants to be when it grows up and hires a designer, which it turns out is what Emily is. She's got all sorts of cool things like tags and ads and an illustration of herself. It's a fun upbeat site with a healthy and sometimes sarcastic sense of humor, which also appeals to my sensibilities.

In fact, the other day i was sitting on an early train that i never actually catch, like a 7:15am peaker i think, and a woman got up to get off at the White Plains stop, and she looked at me and said, "aren't you that guy with the blog"? and I said "depends, are you carrying anything that might be used as a weapon?" and she said, "I'm Emily. I write the I ride the harlem line blog". and we shook hands. Fellow commuters. Fellow bloggers. It's nice to be part of a group. A group of slightly unbalanced commuting misfits, but a group none the less. Please show my fellow bloggers some love. Thanks