The Projects

My twitter changes all the time. My mood, sometimes. But my schedule, that never changes, at least during the week. Whether you're in school or at work, Monday through Friday typically has a design set in place, a maze to work your way out of each week. The maze doesn't change, but somehow it's never as easy as it looks. Obvious traps, dead ends, detours you didn't expect to take, there's all these factors that make some weeks last forever and others seem like they never occurred. Point is, the maze itself never really changes. I was thinking about this on my commute home yesterday. I sit in a train filled with strangers, all of us just making our way out of the maze. I tend to focus on my commute a lot. I guess I'm baffled by mass monotony, but there's not much more of an explanation. So I try and look for something odd, a different angle, a new perspective, to make the everyday seem not so everyday.

I'm riding along...

Out the window I see the city, it's dark out now, and the uptown kids have hit the lights. I've always found Harlem terribly interesting. I've hardly spent more than a few moments walking through, yet every time I take this train, doors open up into a Harlem wind. My dad used to work out there, I remember. From behind a dashboard and beside his partner (my godfather actually) he patrolled the city as one of the "finest." He even coached a little league baseball team on some dusty diamond behind brick walls. He knows that place much different than I do. I know it only through the glass. From here I can see the buildings, "the projects," as they say, and the speckled lights that shine inside every room that holds a life. Across the cast iron balcony, behind that red curtain, there's a story. It's appropriate that floors of a building, are also called stories. "I'm 30 stories high," one might even say...and boy is that true. Every window is a whole new plot. Inside one you've got a family of five, in another a retired sanitation worker, and just across the hall, a bachelor's pad (why is it never bachelorette's?). And from where I sit, I get a momentary glance into that life. Exposed like a dollhouse, I can see inside their story. But only for a moment. The train is always moving. I also notice the fire escapes, these ladders that connect one story to another, those beneath it and those above it. It will always be there, the option to escape. Sometimes it takes an emergency, a fire that forces you out and takes you somewhere safe. Yet other times it's simply an escape, a tempting path out of your own story and a way into another.

Harlem is what I see today. The train keeps moving.