you can't get there from here

it always used to make me laugh that sketch on saturday night live, it was a weird jeopardy spoof where adam sandler and such had to give directions to some obscure place, and of course the winning answer was always "you can't get there from here". my favorite answer was the one where you have to turn right by the retahded kid selling fireworks.
awesome
but i think you can't get there when you don't know where here is.
i know where i am physically, but i can't get my bearings otherwise.
i don't know which end is up, i feel the wrong things, i say the wrong things, i do the wrong things. i feel and say and do all these things that have nothing to do with the person that i think i am
am i that person? am i the person that i don't know, the one who does and says and feels things that i don't understand or even like?
how does that happen?
how did i get here?
where was i?
was i there already and i didn't know it?
am i here?
or am i still there?

beuller? bueller?

Subway not the sandwich chain

Having lived in brooklyn for a whle now, i have spent a lot of time over the past years on the subway. While i have never experienced a black-out where evacuation was necessary, nor any type of gun violence during my many travels around manhattan and the outer boroughs, i have experienced a great many annoyances, as have most subway riders over the years. These annoyances vary in intensity from very little to very great, but apart from the major annoyances detailed above, i thought i had pretty much maxed out on possible new subway irritations- until today.

I have in the past; sat in bleach, been spilled on, yelled at, chased off by bible thumpers, stuck without moving for 20 minutes in a sardine-packed car, hit on, disgustingly violated, caught between manic schizophrenic dude and aggressive yelling blue collar worker dude, witnessed many different types of ililcit behavior, and various other general jostling and entrapments involving poor subway etiquette (let people OFF the train first morons). But today. Today, my friends, was a new, completely unexpected experience in annoying train rides. Our train conductor was an announcement addict. I do not mean that he was addicted to getting on the speaker and making the announcements himself, I mean, instead, that he seemed to have his finger continuously on the button that plays the wonderful prerecorded MTA messages we have all come to know and love "Ladies and Gentleman" croons the weirdly computer animated soothing voice, "If you see a suspicious package..." they just kept coming. Everytime we stopped we heard "Stand clear of the doors while trains are in the station" at least 3 times, in between stops we heard "thank you for riding with the MTA" and many other random announcements multiple times. No points for originality. Our conductor was like a See 'N Say happy kid who couldn't stop pulling the cord. I think in my 10 minute ride from Borough Hall to Union Square I heard at least 30 announcements. At least. When all was said and done, and I stepped off the train, pushing through the crowd of people all trying to be the 1st one on, I was ready to bash my head against a wall, if only to end the reverberating "Ladies and Gentleman..."