Red lines. One and the nine. polar-bipolar beats.
Dirty confused angles of slipshod poured concrete.
Concrete creating sidewalks. Journal this. Remember tonight.
Flushing, NY. Main street platform. It accomodates four separate old style red-bird passenger cars. You know, the kind that have dilapidated safety sensors which make every double door a potential flesh slicer. Two express lines. One local. One broken line that always reeks of warm chocolate donuts and whorish perfume. Moving lakes of Koreans with bags of dead groceries surround me. The Flushing iron and steel syringe caps me, taps the vein, and injects one screaming
Filipino with the whitest American accent into the New York circulatory
subway system. My windows provide me with a dark preview of the cityscape, lit up with corporate building windows and reflective skyscraper surfaces. Dusk arrives earlier on cold November evenings. The chill slowly blankets my city around 5 PM with the bitch evil night resting her dark, heavy black whispers on bald building rooftops and oversized hot dog vender umbrellas.
Hot dogs. They have a better likelihood of surviving the fit of anger a third nuclear war would bring than your elderly grandmother. And we sell that kind of robustness here in NYC for 1.50, condiments free.
NY. Nuclear hot dog phantasmic holocaust. The US nuclear defense program has
E-3 Sentry AWACS in the air at all times in the event of cataclysmic destruction of all primary nuclear command posts. Within those airborne aircraft are arming codes for warheads.
A good terrorist will target major coastline cities for nuclear strike.
They will target the
White House.
They will target
NORAD.
The United States early warning systems will fail.
Minutemen intercontinental ballistic missiles will not launch. Population death counts of unbelievable proportions will tally as our leaders realize the flawed programming of
Rapid Execution and Combat Targeting. In an ever consuming wall of flame, existence will become simple, still, and new again.
California will be a grave.
New York will be a grave. Big, ugly graves with upturned Volvos and demolished school buildings for gravestones.
Primary, secondary, and tertiary strikes report back to terrorist bunkers with acceptable damage counts.
Human loss. Machinery loss. Amazing confusion on all levels and branches of U.S. government.
The President is dead. Yet the
United States will still launch. AWAC copilots in the sky will check their codebooks against the authorization codes being frantically screamed to them over encrypted channels by handsome
Tennessee army privates with sweaty hands on red keys, levels and levels below ground in aluminum steel metal silos. AWAC pilots will exchange arming codes, with prayers of death to accompany our nuclear black angels.
St. Michael the
archangel delivering the warheads of God, right? Did the terrorists refer to their missiles with such overt religious zeal, too? In three minutes, enemy early warning systems will also fail. Three minutes to annihilate the United States. Four more minutes for our secondary launch silos and submarines to launch.
Mutually assured destruction in seven minutes.
Give or take a minute.
I pass Queensboro Plaza and my N,R transfer. This hasn't been the first time I've missed a transfer from my daydreams of Sbarro
hotdogs and
nuclear war.
Red lines. One and the nine. Red lines. One and the nine. On Friday nights when I run out of beer and my workstation crashes from poorly pirated
3D software, I ride the lines. I people watch. My walnut brown and yellow skin experiences the chill of air conditioned train cars ever mingling with the freezing air of cold
November nights. I will transfer, eat candy bars, and transfer lines some more till I get to the downtown red 1 or the 9. Magic fluxes of time are experienced in those tunnels where I watch
rave girls,
Jewish rabbis, and pregnant Spanish women intermingle like some cheesy promotion poster on the NY
melting pot. I smell. I reek of
Guinness beer and
twix bars. I am calmly yet firmly thrown off the 7 line at 5th Ave. by a Latino policeman. It seems that expelling old liquor from my gut and out of windows on moving vessels of public transportation is illegal in his eyes. Punishable by exiting said vessel of public transportation.
5th avenue is alive with fucking people. I will walk all the fucking way down to
Times Square and acquire my ever most prized subway line there. I capture souls with my Olympus D-450 zoom, digital filmless photography, high quality and easy-to-use digital camera. Extra flash cards jingle against house keys in my pocket. Everyone is
beautiful. At three AM, people turn into colors and sounds, all captured with high resolution 8 X 10 electronic ferocity.
Bitch night heavies her hand upon my face and neck. It is
freezing tonight. My hooded sweatshirt and overcoat do nothing to keep me warm. I notice people notice the miniscule freckles of freezing vomit icicles on my garments. Perhaps they think I'm not a photographer? Perhaps they have stereotyped me as '
trouble'. Or 'pathetic'? Or not good with
computers?
The last one makes me
smile.
South Ferry, bowling green... last stop. I check the battery status on my D-450. I wipe little coat fuzzies off the eight element aspherical glass macro lens. I need a candy bar. I also need to find a one or nine uptown. At this 4am hour, I am beaten. Tonight I don't feel the magic of the
subway, the
beauty and
ugliness of new yorkers, or the excitement of taking pictures of
strangers. It's late, I'm tired, and this is no where near
Flushing. Fuck.