Meditations in Transit

I started at some point meditating while on the subway. The subway, how many hours have I wasted staring away into the nothingness of an ad, or at a subway map, my head resting on the car's walls where a grease stain had developed from so many riders. Staring at other straphangers, guessing what they'd been through, were they coming from work, a night out or were they just floating around from bench to bench. All the different shoes, the latest basketball kicks or speckled Red Wings, does the devil wear Prada or Payless? 

When I was at Art & Design (HS), I had to take the E every day at rush hour to 53rd & Lexington. That wasn't fun, lemme tell ya. I'd get on Jamaica Van Wyck and pray there was an empty seat. I'd scan the adjacent train cars, ready to leap into action. I once jumped into a desolate train car during rush hour at 53rd & Lex, a half-second before I entered wondering why it was so empty, how could that be? That was a half-second before I was hit in the face with the wicked waft of fermented bum on a humid train in mid-June. You would think I'd follow the rest of the folks that made a bee line for the doors at the end of the cars. Nope. I stayed on a full 45 minutes until Jamaica Van Wyck, happy to have a seat. 

Nowadays, I sometimes ride the tram here in Strasbourg. There are characters; the drunkard winding in with a beer can of 8,5% alcohol, the geriatric Alsatian couple shuffling onto seats, the young Arab kid with his fake Gucci murse and skinny Bayern Munich track pants. Le Ried the train stop, I think I'm in the hood (if I'm not mistaken, this hood is next to le Marais), this is supposed to the equivalent of East New York, where money and herb exchange hands like the Rastas used to do it by the McDonald's on Queens Bully and Jamaica Ave. And yet here I am, wearing my rojiblanco jersey, still rocking some Lululemon shorts from my stint there and blue flip-flops and I'm chillin', not a care in the world. Life here is easier, simpler, you can still get stuck up at knifepoint or assaulted but it doesn't happen with the same frequency. I also hardly take the tram, I have a bike and to get from one end of the city to the other can take 20 minutes, 30 if you're really on the outskirts. And so it's hard to meditate while riding my bike, my commute was a mere 10 min. So now those moments come when I travel, when I'm on a train heading to Paris or a bus on the way to Frankfurt. I have my writing book, a liner (because I hate ballpoint pens), a book to read and headphones. I think I'm ready for my journey.