End of Summer Suite Part I (9/10/07)

Current mood: quixotic

I'm going front to back here, newest to oldest, and (I hope) in rapid fire. Olivia took pictures of the Coney Island scene, so I'll post those once she scans them.

Ok, first one is yesterday, on the 3 train. It's a brief one and not as big and loud as last weekend's holiday carnivalesque insanity, but it's good way to get the gears greased and limber the typing fingers up again. It's been awhile, ain't it, people?

Anyway, I'm on the three train going home, maybe one stop away, and there are no seats because it's the weekend so I'm standing in the doorwell, just dazed and recuperating from the fact that where I got on there was this odd simultaneous moment of music whereby I was trying to decide which damn Dylan album I was going to listen to when the ratty dude playing geetar with the scraggly hair and teeth I had passed coming down the stairwell and was now out of sight across the platform starts singing in with "You're gonna make me lonesome when you go." But he's singing it slower, more kountry I guess you could call it, and that combined with the distance and the hollow echoes of the tunnels resonating gave it all a spooky feel.

So I'm thinking on that and holding my ipod dumbly in front of me, wondering if this is a sign to queue up Blood on the Tracks or just let it be there, in the tunnels, carrying me home, and i notice these bubbles floating by, like i'm in some underground bathtub stretching my toes out. except the bathtub is shiny steel with justin timberlake futuresexlove tour ads amid a tucked in "poetry in motion" panel of a Whitman poem. I look around and there's kids, an infestation of children, gangled all over the seats buzzing every which way but still--and they're painted. They're all painted up with like silver fish tails and bird of paradise eyes and cheeks. They've taken over the 3 train! I'll be sacrificed!

But they're friendly. There's maybe a dozen of them, an adult capped on each end of the line, yawning and making little adjustments so they don't maim each other, calmly between yawns explaining, no, Tariq, don't blow bubbles in Amy's EYE (to be fair amy was older and less cute and blew her bubbles into T.'s face first, but so it goes). They've also got their weapons--giant knotted balloons being flung inches from my legs and across the lap of another hapless adult bystander. And just as Tariq stands up to shout amid an opaque cloud of soapy fun, she catches my eye, then I hear it come out of his mouth, "Bubble Party!!!" And he collapses like somebody's tickled him even though the giggles are of his own volition, and he shakes in the chair next to my fellow hostage, and she keeps me eyes and rolls it like marble madness down the screen of her eyelid, and we just crack up.

They've taken over the train!!! Somebody call for help!!!