the C Train cometh

"A moment to save the children, sir?"

Some guy is talking to me by George Washington in Union Square and I just want to be alone. "These fucking leeches, I think, what I say is, "Please leave me alone." It just comes out.

"Fuck you," he says after a couple steps. I don't care, I'm alone, staring out at the twilight, purple almost black lit up by signs. It feels good, leaving the all day surrounded by students and house-cleaning administrators. The security guards had gotten everything good for breakfast once again but now I was having a few seconds of tranquility looking over the signs at the tops of buildings into the night and I was feeling pretty lucky. A little fuck you wasn't going to spoil this mood. I hate those bastards that find it so easy to intrude on your privacy.

I'd just looked at my second apartment in Bed-Stuy. A dispiriting affair considering the price, the kitchen, as Drae put it, was simply built into a hallway of sorts, and I came out feeling kind of low, truth be known and the C to the A to the L was not meant to improve my mood. At 14th Street these Mexican kids, four and six maybe, were hyper-actively handing out orange "Jesus Saves" pamphlets and behind them grandma offered me one but I kept walking, looking at all the orange paper underneath the little statues on the stairs down to the L, little invitations to eternity, it seems so easy.

Anyway, the port deal died and the evil UAE millionaires have said they'll let some other evil millionaires run the ports. Meanwhile, there's really been no call to make the ports actually safer, as they've done at some of the world's other busiest ports. It is odd though, isn't it? How this "war on terrorism" is fought, vocally, as if we are locked in some doomsday race to define heaven and earth, strategically, as if the fight is for profit rather than salvation.

You know, I just found out today that a bunch of the Christian right got all freaked out about the Easter Egg Hunt on the White House Front Lawn back in January. I went to one blog and was looking at it and in the corner they had pictures of the 9/11 planes crashing into the World Trade Center on a loop. Strange how much they enjoy the feelings of pity and prayerfulness that accompany witnessing the pain of others. Perhaps Vonnegut was right to advocate Mel Gibson making a movie simply observing a man being boiled to death.

I should sleep. Tomorrow we begin discussions about immigration and I have to write a recommendation first period and see if I can find one of the students a copy of Crime and Punishment.

There's a lot about all the steroids Barry Bonds has been taking and some guy in the Post was writing about "755" (Aaron's home run record) as if it was some nun's virginity, about to be defiled, but I have to admit, I'm more concerned, when I think about it, about the validity of the Giants' wins and losses, especially the year they won the National League and came within a few outs of the World Series. How can you define their seasons if their best player (playing perhaps the best baseball ever played...) was so juiced he started to look like an East German swimmer? In a way it would have been 1919 all over again. Oddly enough, with Bonds, nobody mentioned the idea that he was doing it for a payday, everybody seems to point at pride and desire, usually celebrated things. Here they are, oddly perverted, and now with the ghoulish impersonation of Paula Abdul to boot.

Bonds once said in an interview I read, that he loved watching Ryne Sandberg play ball, with all this bullshit and juicing, when I think of Sandberg, suddenly it makes me think of a more pure game...I don't like the Costas bullshit, you know, thinking if it was 1958 everything would be ok, but the steroid thing is so frustrating because it does throw the balances off and it does make you long for the days when they just took some greenies and went out there...suddenly I have to stop, a keening for Wrigley Field, how the field opens up, lush in the early summer, emerging after the crowded sidewalks and vendors, tourist buses from Iowa and Wisconsin, the scoreboard and Lake Michigan off in the distance; Lake Michigan between the buildings: a few rectangles of deeper blue beyond the powder white foul lines marking the field. You can't not look for the new flags, Santo's ten and Sandberg's twenty-three tied to the foul poles beneath Banks's fourteen and Williams's twenty-six and then looking for the guy I always buy my program from, ancient, looking like the kind of guy who suffers from Lumbago and knows what it is. The same guy emerging later and selling Cubbie claws and pennants with a long face: two pencils and keep the change. Shea Stadium, by contrast, is cavernous and unbeautiful, Yankee Stadium arrogant and plain. There is nothing in baseball that beats Cubs/Cardinals in June and as long as Barry Bonds doesn't fuck that up I'll be fine.

Some have been saying Prior's really in bad shape, ah the Cubs!