Lost in the maze of uncaring people

 

11/22/2008

 

You’re not supposed to think about time passing – that invisible element through which you pass like H.G. Wells’ time machine.

Spokes in a wheel. A film blur.

Yet as I walked from the 9th Street Path station to meet Sharon at the Big Cube in near Astor Place and Cooper Union in the East Village, time was all I thought about yesterday.

I was late. I kept checking my cell phone to see how late and that bothered me.

All my life I’ve lived without clocks – trying to live off the time grid, coming and going to work or school at times when the masses of lemmings were not.

But the lemmings fill the world these days with their rush. The bastard on the crowded Path insisted on taking out his portable computer even though we were knee to knee and shoulder to shoulder. I suppose he was checking his stock quotes or plotting his next moves – part of that general panic of hopeful fools who ride the roller coaster of economics like cocaine addicts.

More of his type pushed me on the stairs climbing up to the street – one with a back pack and logo-less baseball cap insisted one weaving through the people the way people in Beamers do on the Garden State Parkway, not caring if the traffic is so thick they shove people aside or risk a fender bender as long as they perceive progress – as pointless an effort at this seams (this jerk pushed his way through until he could push no more and then slid to the other side of the stairs getting in the way of people coming down). I watched him rush across 9th Street to a waiting Beamer and some other fellow who was barking at him about being late.

Time again.

As annoyed by him as I was, I found myself trying to hurry my own step – others rushing towards me on my side of the sidewalk, giving me no room.

The concept of personal space or right of way ceases to mean anything in a society where we believe “get ahead at all costs.”

And as much as I question the validity of abortion, I curse the Christians for insisting on popping out even more babies to make life on earth worse.

I keep thinking of the rats in the cage theory, where overpopulation leads to every sort of vice, yet more significantly, a degrading of the value of human life.

How can any of us value other people when other people shove us aside as if we do not exist?

Even the concept of common respect has faded.

An old man at the concert coughed his way through some of the quieter passages as if he was a competing instrument.

I kept wanting to lean over his shoulder and tell him to buy some cough drops. He seemed to believe he had the right to ruin the experience for other people.

For a change, I kept my mouth shut. I suspected that if I protested, the snob of a lady who ran the thing would throw me out, not him.

She reminds me of a kinder and gentler version of the jerk who runs the NYU poetry reading series over at the KBG bar a few blocks away, a jerk so full of himself, he literally pushes you out of his way, and then refuses to think he is ill mannered. I guess unless you have some kind of publishing credit, you don’t exist for him – if you do, he kissed your ass. Some world.