(no subject)

[proximoception]

I'm still new enough to subways to be delighted by them, like:

1. When you're in one where the cars are continuous and it goes around a bend and instead of being one of a dozen scattered, sullen strangers in an odorless Waffle House you're suddenly in a near-infinite, somehow beautifully bright corridor - the movement is like when the street folds in Inception, but inexpensively horizontal, or like when a mirrored door suddenly swings to face a mirror on the wall. Except with people. The ones a car or two away always seem so happy.

2. When a workman is in the tunnel and his head is right above the windowline and glides by, hard-hatted, looking blandly in at you sans body in the middle of dark nowhere.

3. When you pull to a platform but don't realize for a moment that you've stopped because you're facing a train moving the other way. I love the illusion that everything is always in motion (a perfect tonic for our senses' customary lie that everything isn't) as much as I love slopes, clouds, tall buildings making the world seem a place of levels (correcting the invisible air's lie that it isn't). Maybe the endless corridor effect is like this too, proving it always goes on past where you'd thought.

I'm so new that while waiting I stare down the tunnel where the train will come. Which sometimes contaminates people nearby before they notice and correct themselves back to staring ahead like a proper urbanite.

I love being responsible for behavioral contagion. I can't match Julie's creating a standing ovation for Richard Dawkins, but my best wasn't bad: at the Vatican (die sad and soon, vile froggy ex-pope) La Pieta is near the entrance in a corner, and the day we came someone had shoved an empty coatrack behind the glass with it. Literally no one was looking at it, but I of course made a beeline for the one thing that really matters in that building, dome included. My purposiveness created some kind of tourist-sucking effect and in minutes there was a modest crowd. Wasn't as neat as seeing La Pieta, but it's neat to remember that I cancelled out that artcockblocking coatrack.

For some reason that reminds me of this one time on highway 1 on the coast near Salinas when the car in front of us, an old woman from what we could see, was going ridiculously slowly but could not be passed (I forget why, maybe construction or traffic coming the other way?). We could see the line of cars back up miles and miles behind us on the successive shorefolds as the hours went by. We decided she was the secret source of all traffic, like that Douglass Adams character who unknowingly caused all British rain.

Comments

[ensenchiridion.livejournal.com]

It took me a long time to work out the muscle structure of the subway stare. Like you I am endlessly interested in their comings, goings, and otherwise related incidences. (I've been here since Autumn of 2010.) I can't ride the seamless cars without sitting edge-of-seat at best, at worst I "surf" the entire trip. (While I should probably feel embarrassed about this, my over-30 self sees it as an opportunity to exercise the muscles of my legs to counteract the restraint of my face.)

And, if waiting for any more than 30 seconds accompanied by an iPod it can be impossible to stand still...

One negative thing about the subway though, that sometimesWeight. You know, that car what corresponds to the bookends of a crappy work week at a crappy job. Sometimes, it's hard to keep from letting the sometimesWeight get you down[, man].

These days present more variability for me now, and I'm happy to have shed most of my Weight.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

That's when we arrived too, though of course we're barely GTA. I don't ride it enough for urban oppression to set in, but of course I see it in some others. Fewer than in any other large cities, to TO's credit.

[mendaciloquent.livejournal.com]

The subway might be the only thing I miss about the city. Something about the stillness of it, very calming. Well, I guess "stillness" isn't the right word. The subway is very loud and full of motion, but the loudness and the motion are mechanical. The hordes, even (especially?) when crammed together, are generally stationary and unbabbling, and this always put me at much-needed ease.

It is funny: I have not been on a subway in years, yet thinking of the particular tone of rail-squeak heard several seconds before the light of a stopping train still produces a memory of relief (in my case, the relief from worrying about being late).

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Funny how certain sounds do that. They say smell basically gets stored in brain-like cells deep up the nose, but some sounds seem to get the same exact reproduction, whereas even trauma images go cartoony at some point.

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

This http://awesome-places.livejournal.com/139023.html is where maybe you should go next for a deeper inner-earth experience. I recall feeling dizzy at descending one of the longer escalators into the depths of precambrium, decorated like absolute beginners´ pottery, the longest of them you cannot see the end of either way, it is over one km aka almost a mile making it illustrate what girl fans of Sisters of Mercy wrote to the singer who used to live in a flat in Hamburg where all his letters were found in a kitchen cupboard by friends of mine: "I took the escalator down to Hell". (Followed by: & "only you can save me", etc. with glittering star post-its surrounding his name written on pony paper.)

In Gothenburg, on the other hand, you can not only take the tram to the seaside and continue by steamboat to one of the archipel islands strewn out like Wotan candy on the water that is sometimes so clear, cosmic vertigo comes closer than comfortable on the same ticket but also take a tunnel straight out into open space. If you start in one of the suburbs I used to live you go through more mountain than you´d realised you were living on top of and then suddenly the troll dance ends and you are being hurled across a fjord like a projectile, facing nothingness but moving fast across to the other side. Münchhausen would have loved it.

Staring into the tunnel to make the tunnelbana come quicker one lonely night in Stockholm, I heard the Devil laugh. I looked around me but couldn´t see him or anyone else, for that matter. I was the lonest traveller waiting for the last subway that never came. I could have stood there til the end fo time or morning broke but the second time the Devil laughed at me with an echo, I knew, I had heard him and was not crazy. It did happen. When I came up from his waiting hall I saw the man in the ticket booth smiling to himself at reading a thick book placed upside down no doubt, beside the microphone. I hope, he is well paid by his boss.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Doubtful I'll be affording a Europe trip this decade, but who knows.

[jones-casey.livejournal.com]

i've never ridden the underground though i've had occasional occasion to ride the el. i expect to be delighted likewise when i do, and i appreciate the appetizer.

and, as an adams aficionado, applaud an amusing analogy. we had a similar situation on highway one in august (traffic coming the other way at fault) in which i finally had a chance to gun the v8 engine on our rented muscle car and pass three cars at once (the two drivers directly behind this incarnation of the secret source lacking either the courage or intelligence (or ambition?) to do so) -- though c. (needlessly) worried about our safety, time was of the essence, and i couldn't resist the urge to capitalize on the strengths of a vehicle i'll never own myself. i plowed a good chunk of coastline before any of the drivers trapped in my wake encountered a safe opportunity to do the same and and begin to catch up to me when i inevitably found myself behind another sunday driver.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Basically the same as when the L is in a tunnel.

But I'm amazed you've reached our age without taking at least DC's or New York's? Especially since you do so much travelling! Feels like I've been hardly anywhere.