Uptown Downtown

96th Street station is ugly.

It looks like a bombed out shelter. It's either being renovated or torn down. My problem with it is that it is too narrow. With the gentrification of the area, and more and more people commuting downtown and uptown from here, it needs to be enlarged, the hallways widened. Yet, how exactly do you do something like that with trains constantly rumbling through the station at all hours of the night? It seems impossible to me, but a corp of engineers could do it. I'm certain that they could. something needs to be done about it. Probably closed down and blasted out.

There is a crowd in the Way, even when it isn't rush hour, and ride downtown to the Shuttle across town and from there walk from Grand central station over to the library. Then, suddenly it was like it always is. Emails and 2142, and all that shit until closing, and I head over the Madison Avenue Starbucks. All of the tables are taken near the outlets, so I take a seat in the middle where I can see who will be leaving first. Upon looking at the patrons, I find my brother is one of them. He had cockblocked me a seat. Good man, good man.

As I get to work, a friend of OBSIDIAN arrives and the two of them go off to talk, leaving me alone, once again with the two most dangerous things in the world, an individual and a laptop connected to the Internet...oh, and a third thing...time. I work on my shit, typing away furiously, glad to be on the Internet for a change. My apartment pissing me off a little in the fact that I'm in a wealthy neighborhood, and all of these motherfuckers lock out their Internet signals. It appears that the cable company's propaganda has worked. Warning their subscribers of the literally impossible act of someone coming in on their WIFI signal and compromising their PC. The signal originates on the router which has it's own network IP address that can't be seen by the Internet, and a WIFI signal can't jump to another WIFI signal. It was designed that way. A poor man's firewall.

No, rich people, as usual, live in pathetic fear of their stuff getting stolen. I've got tons of signals, and yet, NO signal open for me to surf on except for @home and another one. And they seem to have taken a Thanksgiving vacation. Perfect. But at Starbucks, I have an uninterruptable signal, but not the time. Before I know it there is an announcement that the store is closing. I pack it all in and head back uptown, and back to my room, where I proceed to feed like a vampire in a blood bank.

I can feel myself growing fatter.

I have to stop this eating. I have to either get control of myself or buy less shit to sit around for me to vacuum up. I crawl into bed and go to sleep. I awake early the next day. This will be a day where I'll stay indoors because word has it that my Coordinator will be coming by to 'check up on us', so I have to cancel everything today and wait on her. No problem, I have my computer and time, two of the most dangerous things in the world. I go the the bathroom on the 'right' to pour out a bottle of urine.

Oh, yes, I had to go in the middle of the night but did not feel like dressing up, taking key and heading to the bathroom. I had a milk container, so I wizzed in that shit. Then crashed back to bed. Now it was time to empty it out and upon lifting the lid of the toilet, I find still the damage that I had left yesterday. Wow. Maybe a good flush would be all that's needed to cure the situation. No, the water level just rose like before, stopping at the rim. In my old apartment I would plunger the fuck out of the bowl to clear the drain, but there was no plunger. This also was not my apartment. I head over to the bathroom on the left and poured out my piss. After tossing the container in the trash can in the hall, I retired to my bedroom.

Now that I'm in the privacy of my home, I would like to talk about my fellow tenants. You realize that this entire building is filled with Public Assistance receivers. Not the very prettiest people that you will ever meet. Shifty, shady, scheming, just an all around sketchy group of thugs. I run into them on the elevator. I walk in, surrounded by a Hip Hop video of wannabe gangsters. I stood there, amongst them, rigid and uncomfortable, although I did not show it, I was scared out of my fucking mind.

Some of them are dried up old people, like the old 'fireman' on my floor, or a woman last night that entered the elevator with me, dressed in her pajamas and slippers and reeking of old liquor and cheap cigarettes. In the elevator, her head swivels to me like the demon head in the exorcist, a scary grin on her face, eyes wide. I jumped out of my fucking skin, then jumped the fuck back in. Chills raced up my sides, settled in my cheeks. Fuuuck!

Happy Thanks- giving," she caws. Yeah, you too you scary fuck. Get away from me!! She leaves the elevator on the sixth floor. In the late evening you can just about guarantee that there will be these Skek-like men and women standing in the front of the building. I call them Skek-like, but more accurately they should be called Shelts because they do have four walls to come home to. But they have that air of Skexiness to them. Hmmm, I'll have to give a name to these loitering motherfuckers.

Then there is this dessicated mamasita that walks in and out of the elevator every time I use it. She is made up, with puckered lips and tight revealing dresses and pant suits, but there is nothing to reveal. She's as thin and frail as veal. I have more breasts than she does, AND ass. She is a sad specimen of a woman as she walks past me in high heels, sickly, long bony legs, nonexistent ass switching.

I close up shop at my desk. It's time to go downstairs and get online, at Starbucks.

Hobobob