The 7 train was unusually crowded coming home tonight,
especially for the late hour. The consolation prize of working late at the
office is that the trains usually aren’t as crowded. Not tonight. There’s no
Mets game so there must have been a bad delay that is still making the trains
more crowded. It happens all the time.
I don’t get out of work much earlier than 7 p.m. these days,
and I’m usually at my desk well before 9 a.m. It’s at least an hour and change
commute each way, but I can’t really complain. I have a job and the kids are
fed and we have health insurance.
It’s a small office where I work. Everyone has too much work
to do and not enough time to do it. We get emails on Sunday night which I do my
best to ignore until Monday morning, but I can’t always. There’s always one
more thing to mark on the calendar; we won’t remember it otherwise, and our
work will suffer. None of us want to do a half-assed job but there are too many
clients and not enough staff. The boss stopped telling us that “help is on the
way” months ago. Now he fesses up that it will get worse before it gets better.
I daydream about quitting all the time; I keep reminding myself that I have
kids to feed and I need this job.
A woman who crammed herself onto the train at Queensboro
Plaza is trying to move to what she thinks is a better place for her to stand,
but she can’t get there. She’s asking people to move and they answer her back
that they don’t know where else than can go. We’re all packed onto the train as
tight as our bodies will allow. Some poor slob lucky enough to fall asleep on
his commute has too much luggage in front of him and that throws everything off.
The woman struggles in vain to make it to this coveted space, trying to nudge
her way past people who don’t budge.
I was lucky that I got on at Grand Central and got a good
spot to stand in. I try to read but wind up looking out the window of the
train. It’s almost 8 p.m. and the setting sun shines a punishing glare across
the city.
There is hate and violence in the streets of the country and
it will get worse before it gets better. There is ineptitude at every level of
governance and service and the promise of more of the same. There will be more
fighting and less fixing at every turn.
The kind of political violence we’ve seen in other parts of
the country has yet to really rear its head here this season, but it’s still
early. I like to think that we’re an exception, that New Yorkers are accustomed
to a certain level of general animosity and dislike for one another and that by
necessity we don’t let it get out of hand. But this year could prove me wrong;
it’s proven me wrong at every turn so far.
When I was in high school I was lucky enough to visit Rome.
It’s a beautiful city full of great history and art. The people were nice too.
New York will survive and be here forever, long after the
American empire has done the way of the Roman one. Maybe that’s the best we can
hope for at this point. We do what we can and look out for our own, try to
remain strong and leave our bloodlines in good shape for the future. Let our
blood survive while society drives itself asunder. It’s happened before; we can
fight one another but we can’t stand except from human nature or the forces of
history.
This is going to be a long, hot summer.
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