This post is not for the squeamish. Contains violent imagery.
I have this fantasy now in which I go to Penn Station dressed in Velcro-ed business attire and a Barbie mask both of which I whip off while running down the stairs to my train, revealing Celtic warrior wear underneath complete with blood, mud, and woading...What do You think?
***
With so many people tracing the same steps every morning (a costly habit in time, money, and energy), the daily commute seems like too great a source of power for cosmic forces not to tap. Riders, drivers, by-standers, and passers-by lose lives every year clamoring to heed the call of the Big Apple, without settling directly in her, justifying the excess of the suburban sprawl. And so in reverence to this hungry power, I lift my thoughts to it/him/her and sometimes I find she tempts me with the thoughts of strange pleasures, releases from the grinding ritual we perform, but really, I think, she just wants the thing acknowledged. She wants her her fetters pulled at and struggled in. She craves a physical manifestation of the maddening.
***
An unbidden fantasy flashes in my mind as I leave work to head straight home (why, in the greatest city in the world, do I make no pit-stops? why rush a return to my unahppy abode?). The hot surface of the street vendor's flat grill entreats me and demands answers. I find myself wonder: How would it feel to throw my forearm onto it? And in rich psychosomia, I experience the result, in my mind like a deep dream, and in my waking body as a faint pulsing echo. First it would sting, and my muscles would tense with the reflex of retraction. Oh no, but I would press harder, (as the Suburban Spirit bids). Besides, my soft skin would stick to the griddle, leaning my weight down would only make it cook faster, making my skin numb and unelastic. Ripping it off, pealing apart the dead pieces, I wouldn't feel a thing beside the trickling heat in the surrounding tissue. Oh, hmmm, and how would it look? First red, then cooked white, oozing with the remains of my subcutaneous layer, speckles of burned fat mixed with the metal alloy of the heating appliance. My ears buzz from inside: How would it sound? And a voice my own and not answers in an cheery sing-song: At first, like nothing. Then sizzling, sizzling, sizzling. Oh and how would it smell?! (I answer before I finish asking, simultaneous thoughts building and interweaving in anticipation.) Would burning flesh stand out in a city of a thousand foul and fetid scents and more? Side-walk and street traffic wouldn't even know the difference. Cooking body parts are cooking body parts. A norm. Nothing more than pork roasting. It would smell as it does now, I think, my mental flash reverberating with the present. I shiver and tingle. And the Suburban God and I laugh. Yes! It would be a good tease on the evening news, how long would it would take for anyone to notice anything "out of place" (provided I was a good girl about it and didn't make a show or a peep of it) with a young woman resting her arm on a giant hot plate outside a hospital?
Ah, but I'm fast-paced, hard-faced walking down the street in actuality. All pauses from the marionette motion pulling me forward make me queasy. What's to say stopping for a snack or drink or word are so out of the question? I don't know. It all seems to go in the same category as pushing my arm down on that vendor's grill. If I can't call attention to the absurdity of the situation, what's the worth in doing it at all?
It begins to rain, a New York rain, which is a sorry excuse for a rain. It's more like an aerosolized dead man's spit, against which umbrellas are less than useless, caught up in the wind and other people's faces. As I descend into the sacred subway station, hot air rushes me, blowing up my skirt, like the cloying rotting breath of a hundred horny old men. My head swims. I swear as I climb downwards, downwards, downwards, I can feel haphazard oily prickles on wrinkled rough skin brushing my exposed thighs. As the bile rises in my throat, (wishing to match disgusting with disgusting) I find that I have been beaten to it. Fresh vomit stands scentless at my feet, its acidic odor masked by the general decay and humidity of the station. It expresses my sentiments exactly. And somehow I feel as though my tiny prayer has been answered. Oh what a generous commute, to meet my every whim!
***
I hope to continue on with this ungelded narration. It's definitely part of a bigger weirdness.
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