First light. 6am sitting in the back if the Music Express limo riding out of Kennedy Airport, fresh off the plane from Buenos Aires. Pink cloud whisps in the first faint blue sky of a Monday morning rush hour are my first impressions as I arrive in NYC after all these months and years. And after all these years, I realize, it hasn’t changed a day. Not really, not in any perceptable way I can see or smell or touch here now.
Not even 7am yet and the streets of Queens are littered with millions of bright red tail-lights, millions of sleepy commuters sitting in millions of cars, packed together like dying fish in a dark asphalt aquarium, on their way to work. Shit.
We pass the tree lined streets of tortured weather-beaten grafittied wooden houses where nobody’s home, I think, probably cuz they’re all sitting in their fucking cars out here, going somewhere, going nowhere, going to work in the goddamned city where they spend their lives sitting in cubicles pushing sad little scraps of paper around. Working they call it.
Working to pay the rents and mortgages and taxes on the houses they’ll never have much time to go back to and sit arond in anyway. Some of them will retire to Florida, I guess. What the fuck good is it, I think, when they’re too goddamn old to fuck? And then they will die in air-conditioned retirement cubicles watching the television as the dark Carribean stars wither outside in the humid mosquito air. Shit.
And they all look so tired here, I think, sitting in their fucking cars, too beat and befuddled to even honk their fucking horns at each other, too defeated to even act like the bleating cattle they surely are.
And it’s the same thing going on right now in the city I just left behind on the opposite side of the planet, and the same fucking thing in every city in every fucking country on earth. It’s all the same. All the same drill, the same cars, same faces of carefully preserved faceless human doom and mindless activity in concrete mazes everywhere you go. Death on the installment plan.
© Jonathan D. Shaw 2010.
Arent we obedient little puppets. Everyone should look at their lives. Good post JS.
To think so many of sheeple have no idea they ever signed the contract for that installment plan.
Here is to seeing life come at you with eyes wide open, maybe some of us will be able to get out of the way.
Nice post.