6 Nov 2009
إرجاع
big city, big tings a gwan. tracks that intertwine and never end, connecting and separating at the very same time. marathons and halloweens and world series championships and fall-to-winter-bluster and purchased mayoral elections and goldstone report votes (44 abstentions?) and speeches upon speeches to be drafted and friends getting laid off and friends getting swine flu and art exhibitions and parties and fascinating new people and miserable old enemies and madness and musica and friday morning hangovers and life-and-death top of the table futbol matches that are both watched from a distance on flatscreen televisions at a dingy old pub in the early mornings and also physically played out on sundays alongside a new club boasting a 50-year history rooted in the community that represents a small subsection of ethnic new york city on grassy and muddy fields throughout the outer boroughs against other jarringly talented squads reppin’ different new-immigrant enclaves of the city.
and all of this happens in a week’s time sandwiched by the gastronomical excitement of new restaurant openings in the ‘hood and a manna-from-heaven tamale lady and, just then, a gaggle of attractive blonde romanian women walk by on the frigid above-ground platform clad in leather boots over their tight jeans as some freckly irish construction workers visibly look them up and down while two lovestruck latin american teenagers on their way to school naively embrace and share a set of cheapo treble-y earbuds listen to some cheesy r&b track with the volume too high annoying the korean woman standing next to them texting texts in korean text as a train whizzes past them all but fails to stop because it’s filled to the brim with other commuters seemingly oblivious to the sensitivities of the disgruntled crowd on the platform that lets out a collective sigh of disbelief and colorful under-the-breath curses in gobs of languages and begins to fill up even more as more people make their way up the rusty steps with their breath exposed by the early november morning chill just as a red-illuminated express train hisses and shrieks past the station over the dreaded third rail towards the city on the middle track, its last car lurching around the bend into complete obscurity, moving past the gleaming reflections on the sun-soaked empty office buildings and variegated graffiti-bombed walls in long island city that are now a living time-stamp of the economic collapse and development boom that never quite materialized, taking those hundreds of faceless people into hundreds of faceless directions in a place with millions of possibilities for millions of different people.
just not the weak…
