It turns out I have more incoherant, free form thoughts to express. And so I offer them to the zeitgeist in the hopes that they will be disregarded.
My wife grew up in the Bronx, so she regards the subway as a benign form of public transport. I take a slightly different view, because Iâm a neurotic, gentrifying force. But also because itâs a portal into the eventual collapse of society.
The thing is, I donât want to be confronted by the human condition in live Technicolor. I wanna hear about it in the gentle whisper of a golf commentator, listening to NPR from within the confines of my locked Range Rover. I wanna drive past the banal features of the apocalypse with my windows up and seatbelt on. I wanna jerk off to rap in the shower and threaten to move to Canada. So, the older I get, the more I think that Plato got it wrong.
We should stay in the cave. Whatâs wrong with a projected fragment of reality? Who the fuck wants the gruesome, interactive version when you can watch the livestream in 4K? I can pretty much get the gist from within the cave. I donât need to go to an actual store to learn that theyâre putting those anti-theft security tags on eggs, while an Ewok-looking kid with a moustache shoplifts a Twix and calls his mom by her first name. I donât need to watch the news to see dazed Eastern European teenagers wielding Lockheed Martin tchotchkes in some ideological proxy war.
I just wanna open a bottle of Bardstown Ferrand in my bathrobe and slides, and watch MILF Manor. The cave is good.
So, for this reason, the subway fucks with my chi. It requires venturing beyond the pale to confront the raw, animal nature of man. And I find it difficult to sit across from people without imaging the color of their lives in intrusive, voyeuristic detail. I wonder whether they have that gene that makes cilantro taste like soap, and how they feel about The Sopranos finale. I wonder if they ever sit in their cars after work, staring in silence at the home theyâve built around proximity and convenience, until it starts to look like the fucking Black Hole of Calcutta. I wonder whether theyâve navigated their lives with intention or autopilot. I wonder how close they are to driving a minivan of medicated children into a lake. And I wonder whether Iâm gonna spend February on a beach in Portofino with blood of pure Sangiovese, or convulsing in a fluorescently-lit emergency room whilst the sweaty pageantry of death unfolds around me in a slowed-down Broadway closing number. Something dire and low concept, like Cats. Which is to say â fuck Plato. Unless Iâve missed the point of the allegory, which is also possible given that Iâm a well-meaning but fundamentally witless person. So fuck Plato, maybe.
