Thursday, August 21, 2008
The New Ride: The Spleenvent Continues
Yesterday I waxed unenthusiastic about my new commute to work. My vitriol was unexpended by that rant, so I continue unabated:
The route, too, seems to weave through town so as to minimize our possible exposure to life’s magnificent pungency: Once we leave the park it’s a long shot along Lombard, perhaps the city’s most picturesque street with its sinuous masonry curves - but we don’t visit that part, rolling instead along the vapid breadth of its western reaches lined with innumerable motels and desultory breakfast joints, an architecture drained of poetry and spirit. At Van Ness we hang a ricky and head south on the city’s broadest boulevard, past bucktoothed condos and shabby dive bars, the occasional remaining stately manse superwhelmed by the surrounding stucco stultification. A left at Broadway rolls us past a few uninspired blocks of apartments and playgrounds, into a three-block-long tunnel under Russian Hill and out again at Chinatown.
This is not, however, the funky kitchy chinatown so famous as postcard fodder. Rather, we cruise a wide, gritty boulevard of shuttered liquor stores and cut-rate herbologists, scary-looking pet stores and questionable cafes. We then barrel through three or four blocks of North Beach’s tawdriest reaches, strip clubs vying with megataverns for the sweat-wet dollarbills of tourists now sleeping off well-drink buzzes. We speed right past tiny cross-lanes named for people I’ve never heard of - Turk Murphy Lane, someone with the surname Peter whose last name starts with M but whose memorial alley we pass too quicky for me ever to make out the name in full - mere capillaries of asphalt that lead nowhere special, too insignificant to merit inclusion on any map I can find.
Then, with a suddenness so swift as almost to escape notice, the tone shifts and we’re surrounded by big blocky warehouses and light industrial sites and an INS field office, all substantial in scope and megalithic in their lack of architectural inspiration. A right on Battery brings us finally into the Embarcadero bussiness district, with tall shiny multiuse towers and a streetscape that has grown inviting and interesting by the time the bus doors open at California and Front street and most of us disembark. There’s one more stop a few blocks futher down that’s actually closer to my office, but which would leave me to walk beneath a really foul highway overpass I’d just as soon avoid so I hit the sidewalks at my first opportunity. I walk one block east amid caffeine dispensaries from which sleepy office hotties trundle with their cardboard cups of joe, reach Market Street at the shoeshine plaza and cable car turnaround, cross eight lanes of blacktop and trolleytracks to the Federal Reserve and then head down two blocks as part of a true urban blend of pedestrians to the yeast-rich air of the midblock bakery where my paseo cuts through between tall blocky buildings to the midrise where I’ll huddle in a fifth-floor cube all the rest of the day. It’s a short walk, not quite four blocks, but that’s where I get my fix of humanity for the morning - and frankly, I cherish it.
A few Mondays ago I was late enough and unlucky enough to miss my chance for a seat on my boring new bus. A tall, pencil-slim woman with straight blonde hair, a tailored suit and cold blue eyes had boarded just before me; we walked the short aisle, took our places standing at the rear of the bus, and begain mutually untangling our respective earbud cords. More commuters kept piling on and I soon found myself cozily wedged between the icy blonde and a beefy pale guy in jeans and a business shirt, his florid necknape peeking at me from under short salt-and-pepper hair. More people boarded; the aisle was filling up. I fumbled further with my ‘pod, seeking escape. Yet more travelers were climbing on; my personal space was fast shrivelling.
I could smell my neighbors - though they were sufficiently clean and inoffensively fragrant, I resented the imposition. The big guy ahead of me called forward to the driver, “Send them back, there’s still room.” The woman behind me hissed at him over my shoulder, “What are you talking about? We’re at capacity!” “Don’t be selfish, these people need to get to work just as badly as you do.” “Don’t tell me my business, jerk.” It was the first free-standing conversation I’d heard on this bus, it wasn’t starting off well, and I was in the middle of it. Great. “I don’t need to start my Monday like this,” I announced, turning up the volume of the music in my ears and trying to ignore his big wet lips and her pale dessicated ones as the sniping then began in earnest.
The doors closed and the bus started rolling. My fellow travelers raised their voices to continue their castigations. My earbuds, sensing my critical need of them, shorted out. There was to be no escape.
“Why are you being such a jerk about this?”
“Do NOT curse at me! There’s no reason to use that language! Your problem is that you have no respect for other people!”
“I am NOT cursing at you, jerk! Why are you even being like this? The bus is full, goddamn it! There was no room! Why did you say that there was?”
“People have to get to work! There is plenty of room on this bus if people aren’t selfish about it! Why were YOU being so selfish?”
“Okay, forget it. Forget it. It’s all gravy. There’s nothing to talk about. Jesus.”
The burly guy turned to face the front of the bus; his shoulders sighhove visibly. The skinny woman behind me wrestled a phone from the bottom of her designer bag and started texting furiously. The bus lumbered out past the massive Letterman Digital Complex and the antique Spanish cannon guarding the Lyon Street gates, their long barrels beaded with chilly morning dew and gaping mutely in the fog. The manicured lawns and designer groves gave way to dreary streets that subtended blandly outside our tinted windows like the upturned bellies of so many insensate grey snakes.
If that’s what passes for human interaction on the new bus, I guess I’ll take boredom.
(Taken yesterday morning at the main post on my way down to the transit center with my new cellphone camera. Oo lookit me I’m so new-millenium!)
