Friday, October 21, 2005
Fire
When I got to the subway station this morning, I noticed that the closer I got to the platform, the more it smelled like a mini-9/11. I took the iPod phones out of my ears long enough to hear a blaring announcement followed by a klaxon, and then firetrucks.
We were shuffled along from one platform to another before being evacuated from the station. There were choppers overhead and more sirens all over Sixth Avenue, where I waited twenty minutes for a bus that never showed up. So I called my office and told them I was going to be late, and then went over to Hudson to get the bus up Eighth. The streets I walked through were pretty, gray and quiet and it was drizzling a little, and I just decided to enjoy the detour and MOJO Magazine's free "I Love NY Punk" CD.
As I listened to the various tunes about heroin abuse, the Eighth Avenue bus passed dozens of streets that just a few years ago had nothing but abandoned warehouses and dilapidated factories and they've now been renovated into luxury condos. I remembered what New York City had been like in the late 70's, when I first got out of school and was first living on my own.
People had given up on New York, the president had told it to "Drop Dead," and there were a lot of neighborhoods that had abandoned warehouses and dilapidated factories, strewn with tetanus-inducing trash, hookers and drug addicts. Punk music reflected that New York.
The boss at my first day job treated me as if I were a hooker and a heroin addict just because I was a young girl who lived on my own. Not everybody did that then. There were a lot of repressed guys from Long Island at that job who thought that girls who lived on their own in New York were wild hippies and put out. Ha ha ha ha! Were they ever disappointed!
As I got to my office an hour later, I thought: Okay, so I'm a hundred now, but at least when I say I'm late because of a fire, people believe me, unless they have really severe paranoia. And the radiology place didn't "Red Flag" my mammogram, or I would have gotten a phone call by now. I'm going to have my lungs checked out to see if there's anything scary there from smoking or 9/11 or subway fires. Oh yeah, and my ears checked out from listening to punk and other loud musics.
All in all, great to be a hundred and respectable.
We were shuffled along from one platform to another before being evacuated from the station. There were choppers overhead and more sirens all over Sixth Avenue, where I waited twenty minutes for a bus that never showed up. So I called my office and told them I was going to be late, and then went over to Hudson to get the bus up Eighth. The streets I walked through were pretty, gray and quiet and it was drizzling a little, and I just decided to enjoy the detour and MOJO Magazine's free "I Love NY Punk" CD.
As I listened to the various tunes about heroin abuse, the Eighth Avenue bus passed dozens of streets that just a few years ago had nothing but abandoned warehouses and dilapidated factories and they've now been renovated into luxury condos. I remembered what New York City had been like in the late 70's, when I first got out of school and was first living on my own.
People had given up on New York, the president had told it to "Drop Dead," and there were a lot of neighborhoods that had abandoned warehouses and dilapidated factories, strewn with tetanus-inducing trash, hookers and drug addicts. Punk music reflected that New York.
The boss at my first day job treated me as if I were a hooker and a heroin addict just because I was a young girl who lived on my own. Not everybody did that then. There were a lot of repressed guys from Long Island at that job who thought that girls who lived on their own in New York were wild hippies and put out. Ha ha ha ha! Were they ever disappointed!
As I got to my office an hour later, I thought: Okay, so I'm a hundred now, but at least when I say I'm late because of a fire, people believe me, unless they have really severe paranoia. And the radiology place didn't "Red Flag" my mammogram, or I would have gotten a phone call by now. I'm going to have my lungs checked out to see if there's anything scary there from smoking or 9/11 or subway fires. Oh yeah, and my ears checked out from listening to punk and other loud musics.
All in all, great to be a hundred and respectable.
