Train Setbacks

When people take your dinner suggestions it usually means they take you pretty seriously. I mean, who is going to go to a place to consume food recommended by someone who’s daily opinions are not valued? More importantly, if that person takes your suggestion, say in a new city, it means they truly value your opinion and trust your judgement.

This is what I was thinking about sitting in the overheated lobby of New York's Penn Station. I was dodging nostalgia as the station attendant announced publicly that the 173 regional to Washington, DC and Richmond, VA was now boarding. 6 months ago I would have been heading in that direction, out of this "person swamp" that the populous refers to as a city. Now, I am heading where it is somehow colder than it is outside and the only two upsides are less people and lower buildings for the wind to work up courage to slap you in the face.

I was traveling to NYC for business, or should I say social gatherings outside of my place of work. The two day cluster fuck consisted of 5 hours of exhibit hall hand shaking and business card exchanges, followed by 18 hours of frivolous spending and glutinous food/alcohol consumption. The night before I had 4 fucking dinners, 4 dinners. The last one was the larger of the quad dinner experience and I merely winked at the overpriced food and forced saki down my throat like a strep culture stick. Thinking about eating today, after just going on lunch numero duo, makes me want to take my clothes off and force vomit like Nicole Ritchie. Not sure why  I am taking the clothes off to complete this task, but I am predicting that the act produces body heat. Given the temperature of this homeless persons dream space that I am waiting in, naked seems to be the best and only  option for forced vomiting. Personally I am excited about the possibility, there are 7 things I ate last night that I am not totally certain what they were, or if they were even edible.

Looking across the row of waiting chairs it looks like heat waves are forming. The hot air has collected dust particles from the hundreds of thousands of forever unclean passengers and it is just resting in the air. The dust seems to form a permanent cloud that if I squint and reach out, I can break it up and clear a area of relatively purified air. 

A young man, a bit homely but not vagrant, came up with a prepaid credit card and ten dollars in his hand. He claimed that he neede $2.75 to board the LIRR and the prepaid card would not work since he has to enter a zip code for it that didn’t exist. 3 possibilities:

1.     He was being truthful

2.     He wasn’t buying a ticket at all

3.     Stolen, empty, prepaid card

I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I have a feeling the situation was a combination of 2 and 3.  I will certainly be giving this a trial run tonight by entering a fictional card and seeing if it requires a zip code. If it does, ill stop my investigation and just say he used the money properly, or at least did some decent research on his lie. Life is a lie, how we live it is directly correlated with our ability to obscure the truth. Write that down.

So far the 20 dollar bill that I just took out of the ATM in case I needed it has gone to; lying LIRR rider, the coat check lady at the convention center, and the cab driver who was names Infal Combrero. Haitian?  The cab driving race breakdown has really seen some changes in the past year. I think half of Haiti is here driving the cabs. If they all left the city at once New York would be fucked, or the subways would be packed like China. Seems like I am really putting this Jackson bill to good use so far. I may buy a Mr. Goodbar on the way home and a can of Yoo-Hoo.

Boarding the train now at the 6 East. I cannot believe that I am going to be on this moving tin can for 4.5 hours. So much for quick travel. Takes less time to drive than to take the train. You can get halfway across Asia in four in a half hours on a train. Here, you have to plan your whole day around traveling just 115 miles. Good lord, the only thing to do is  to move forward amicably, board this bitch, fall asleep a pray to a god that I don’t believe in that I will wake up 4.25 hours from now.