BART Blog Part 2

Students take my afternoon train, many mixed couples, considering Occupy, or perhaps the Kixeye advertisement that seems to be papered all over Bart. (Reminds me of Hunger Games, that I just read in one day!) A ferocious wolf/canine with his teeth bared invites you to join the many opportunities of working for Kixeye. Finally found out Kixeye is a gaming business. The approach is horrifying to me, but asking some other younger riders, they assure me ‘it’s cool.”

Then, there’s an ad for some law firm. Back in the day my mom called them ‘ambulance chasers’; today, it is a way of life. A sweet little chipmunk says ‘I'm still the 99%. But my settlement check is taking me to Cabo." I am sooooo out of touch with this world. ‘Lost’, the ‘Biggest Loser’, the ‘Hoarders’. 60 seconds of fame is more like 60 seconds of shame.

Bart’s expensive so there isn’t a lot of graffiti or the usual folk one associates with public transit. Of course my notion of that is 98% New York City based. Coming out of the Bart station however, there are similarities that abound. I find myself donating a dollar here, fifty cents there. In particular there’s one sad sack of a homeless guy. I am sure he should be in one of my DD (developmentally disabled) homes, but instead there he is every morning, strange limp, one of his eyes doesn’t seem to track, looks my age, but probably is younger. “Help out a brother?” I give him 50 cents and tell him to get a coffee. That’s a joke. He’ll need at least a two more softies to score a coffee at Burger King. Probably he’s just looking for a drink.

But the gem of the week was the brother who guilted me in to buying his cd. “It’s jazz, man.” He touched my arm, his dreads in my face, and invaded my personal space more than I was comfortable. But it was jazz; he was a musician. “All I can spare is a dollar,” I told him and took the cd. Although my budget is tight, I can justify that expense if I park on the street and save the dollar on the second level parking lot, which is closer to Bart.

When I get home, I have some paranoia, wondering if there is a virus on it. But it’s a cd Delilah, not a dvd to download to your computer. I wonder if when I play it, it will be blank. But wrong on all accounts. There’s music. Trance-dance music, for a rave, the kind I first heard back in NYC days, when poppers and coke were the dance drugs of choice. But the lyrics:

Let's smoke this weed/ So I can get high

I 'm gonna Roll up my beeler/ So I can get high

I got my swisher and

Got my bag of grapes
Of phony? I wanna get high

There are 16 trax, the theme the same, over and over . Is it any wonder I yearn for Cole Porter and Stephen Sondheim? . . . Of course, there was a time back in those disco years, I remember singing ‘Push, push in the Bush” Not to mention a moment of passion where I thought I would like to engage in some video porn. Ah my lost youth!