Tonight while the Colts were covering the spread by the hairs on their chinny chin chins despite Peyton perfection, your bloghole provider was in a West Village Italian restaurant's basement, periodically checking the score on his Blackberry and trying to get as much wine down as possible without imperiling the food. Yes, it was a Work Holiday Frivolity Thing, which led to the 1 am train ride home, and because I'm awake and not nearly impaired enough, you get to hear about it. Curse these observational powers. Fans of Teh Wanking, today is your lucky day.
The place turned out to be less than a block away from a place my band played in New York at least a half dozen times, The Spiral on Houston Street. I thought I recognized the neighborhood -- it's quite close to the East River, near the corner of Houston and Avenue A -- but it's not like we were ever walking around the neighborhood on those nights; we were playing, schmoozing, roadying and then getting the hell home, because the gig was always on a weeknight and we were staring down the barrel of a 3 to 4am bedtime with work in the morning. Just like, well, tonight.
It also never seemed like the nicest place to be; for Manhattan, it was downright seedy, and we always worried a lot about the security of the vehicles. Walking around it tonight, it seemed like little had changed, except for the fact that I was walking the scene of the crime some 10 to 15 years later. It made me want to email old friends for no reason, but luckily, that's just the wine talking, and it won't talk very loudly in the morning. Nothing will.
New York, it is true, never really stops or closes, but it does certainly have thinning traffic. Upon exiting the restaurant around 11:15, hoping in vain to get to Newark in time for the midnight train, I eventually was able to bring down a cab for one of those Only In New York reckless driving / bad shocks Wee! Wee! WEEE! experiences. Six minutes and a dozen traffic lights later, I was at my PATH station, which always seems dirty and compromised late in the evening, though it never really gets to Unsafe. (That's because I'm a white male, and just this side of invisible in my nondescript workaday trudge. Or so I like to think, rather then give in to the fear.)
Forty five minutes later, I'm in Newark, waiting out the 40 minutes until the next hour's train. Inside the station is a 6/7 (out of 10) Asian woman who is well shy of five fett tall, and only getting that close through the use of spiky little stiletto heels. She walks with the confidence of someone who does this every day, and all I can say is it looks like it hurts. Nope, not a sex worker.
The train turns out to be the same double-decker bit of utility that I usually ride six and a half hours earlier in the day, and I'm even able to get one of those Privacy Ensured single seats with the dedicated luggage spot in the front top section, otherwise known as the one you really want and never get.
I sit down to write and get blasted from 30 feet away by an incredibly loud guy who is treating what seems to be the entire train to the spellbinding tale of how juicy his Thanksgiving turkey was. Adding to the, um, merit of the conversation is that he's punctuating his conversation with five-year old African-American slang for no good reason at all. On the plus side, he keeps me awake, despite the cold medicine and wine, for five not terribly pleasant minutes, but his is not a consistent superpower, and at this hour, the train stops at every damn milk stop on the way to its final destination...
and I jerk to a start fifteen minutes and four stops down the line, with 30 more minutes to go. As Satchel Paige once said, "The social ramble ain't restfull," right before he weighed in on the merits of fried foods that anger up the blood.
With fifteen minutes to go, the train picks up snapping with-it girls that can't possibly be riding the rails for a good reason at this hour. We make New Brunswick and the micro-sleeping gets worse. And I get to do this all over again, albeit for the last time in 2008, tomorrow. And as the last dregs of battery life in the laptop and brain life in me trickle out, it's just one station left to go and Publish.
See you again, too soon.
For those of you who know the daily joy of regional rail, a quick question.
