Monday Morning Transit

Second Note of the Series: Scrounging Up a Worker’s Retrospective

I hurled myself off the bed with a force to rise to another Monday morning, perhaps the worst, most challenging day of the week. Went to the bath and performed the perfunctory workweek ablution. I had to grit my teeth through the repeated assault of frigid water against my person. All thanks to the -ber month weather. The ordeal finally over, I jumped into my clothes and I was off.

I might as well have rolled up my sleeves. What awaited me was an exercise in either aggression or passivity. I’m talking about train rides, and before I get ahead of myself, train lines, that mass of man, woman, and child crowding the platform, stretching and coiling down flights of stairs, spilling out onto the sidewalks, snaking along the streets, all the while buzzing with complaint, gossiping, laughing, tsk tsking, fanning, swatting, shifting, and mostly just hot, sweaty, and waiting.

Somewhere in that mass of sweaty, shifting man, woman, and child, I am reduced to a body taking up space, a body against a body, a body behind, in front of, to the left of another. Herded like an animal so early in the morning having shown up for my daily training in waiting, following orders, and keeping silent as I suffer. But there is also room for learning violence, a daily plethora of examples for the vicarious learner: elbowing, snapping, grumbling, bitching, pinching, and the occasional threat of fisticuffs.