public transportation as necessity & art

Tuesday morning...way to work

We’re supposed to love public transportation. But I don’t. My friend Peter and I were discussing public transportation the other day. In NYC Peter would much rather take the bus; in fact he actively “likes” the bus. Peter hates the subway, because you can’t look out the window and are just packed in with anonymous people. I’m the opposite. I’d rather any day go underground into a sensory deprivation chamber and hurtle unimpeded by traffic and street-level anomalies, forward thrust punctuated only by the occasional and efficient letting off and getting on of new people.

You’re not supposed to, but you can drink coffee on the subway. Buses hurtle and sway side to side and rock and lurch unpredictably. I’ve tried 3x to drink coffee on the bus and it’s not pretty. Unlike the subway, arrival times vary based on unforeseeable elements. And you’re still jammed in as with a subway, check by jowl, but it’s harder to ignore because you’re slamming and jamming and rocking into people unless you’re fortunate enough to snag a seat, at which point you’re often on like a park bench--nowhere to look but your book or the people across from you.

Sometimes public transportation is fun. For example, last Friday Anestes from Maine took me out in Berkeley because he’d been able to alight in SF briefly as part of a clump of business travel. He went to my work, met my boss, and then he and I swooped onto the BART train for my first trip to Berkeley—very exciting to be in that town with so many associations of radical activity in the ‘60s—where we had an amazing dinner (forget the name of the restaurant), one of my very best eating experiences in SF.

Afterward, as Anestes stayed on to play in Berkeley, and I hopped back on the BART and took these notes...

BART train - Oakland City Center Station - 10:45pm Friday October 15, 2010

A guy is eating an entire Ziploc bag of what looks to be chocolate chips. Tipped back head, hundreds of little globblets pouring down his throat. He’s got a steer’s horn on a rawhide string that he’s draping from one of the handlebars to the next. He’s in a chair covered with orange and pink fur, mounted on his lowrider bike which is covered with red lights, and lavish bouquets of seagull and peacock feathers. Also on the handlebars are what looks to be hunks of the insides of someone’s sofa cushions, painted Halloween orange and black.

He himself is incredibly handsome, like modelesque, with beautiful bone structure, chiseled features, and thick brown and grey hair in a sectioned-off pony-tail to the middle of his back and a Che Guevarra cap. He’s got a broad back and straight shoulders and muscular legs. He has some kind of sound system attached to his bike, and was listening to the Marshall Tucker Band song that repeats “I’m getting closer to my home” about 365 times in a row, and now the train is so loud I don’t know what his soundtrack is. He sits there fiddling with the ornaments on his bike, adding a magnet to this metal tube mounted  between the handlebars and stuffed with orange feathers.