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Friday, December 10, 2004

THE SUBWAY AT RUSH HOUR AND THE UNWELCOME PROXIMITY OF HUMANITY

So I decided to venture into Manhattan and hit my favorite comic shop despite the cold, wet and generally foul weather. For those not residing within New York City's five boroughs, service on its infamous grafitti-bescrawled subways can be pretty bad and it only gets worse during rush hour and especially the weekend hours thanks to track maintainance and construction; today I had to put up with the inevitable delays spawned by the double whammy of both rush hour getting underway and the weekend schedule buttfuckery commencing at the same time.

After conducting my business at the comic shop I waited for quite some time to board a very late R train back to my little oasis in Brooklyn and finally secured a seat in the humid, puddle-ridden car. The PA squawked out an announcement that informed riders that the train would be making express stops from 34th Street through Canal Street, and while that announcement deterred those members of the sweaty throng who needed the local stops there were still more than enough willing riders and presently the car was packed tighter than the ass of a kid during a sleepover at Michael Jackson's house.

I found myself fortunate enough to obtain a seat right next to the door, but my good fortune quickly turned into a stiff-fingered "fuck you" from the subway gods when a huge, sweaty food giant wedged his three-and-a-half-foot wide asscheeks right next to my head. As his sandbag of a butt hung over the seat's sidewall and wobbled like a seizuring Jell-O mold mere centimeters from my face I became aware that this snacking gargantua was clearly ignorant of the most basic rule of human hygiene: YOU GOTS TA WASH YER ASS.

The flabby cheeks exuded a pungent bouquet of unscrubbed feces, sweat and old romano cheese, a stench so strong that I could have sworn that it was being blown directly into my face by a powerful gust of wind (which in fact it may have been), and though this ill zephyr tortured my nostrils I was not about to give up my seat; there was nowhere to move to and I would have ended up standing for god knows how long, and if you have ever been stuck in such a situation you know what a short-fused agony that can be. Sadly, I resolved to endure the unwelcome ass-fest in hope that the offender would eventually disembark in order to continue his perpetual search for the perfect bag of pork rinds.

All of the mind-clearing meditative aspects of the Eastern disciplines that I have dabbled in were summoned up in order to ensure my survival of this most hostile ass-ault, and the shambling mound of flesh stayed put all the way to DeKalb Avenue in Brooklyn, bringing my nasal violation to a running time of twenty minutes.

And to add insult to injury, when the train reached the stop just before mine it was announced that in order to make up for the previous delays the train would once more be making express stops, skipping my station and continuing on for another forty blocks; if I wanted to make the local stops I would have to stay on until 36th Street and head back on a Manhattan bound train, thereby extending the trip by at least another half hour. I opted to get off and walk the ten blocks to my apartment, rain be damned. Well, after two violations I figured that I could handle the comparatively mild inconvenience of a bit of drizzle, and the fresh air certainly cleared the last fetid vestiges of sweaty buttcrack from my olfactory system, so I sort of won after all.

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