it must be the time, or the season, or maybe some little karma god that I trampled under foot because these days even when I’m laying low not taking chances I’m still taking chances. Par Example: late last night on the A-- I closed my eyes for a hot second and woke up to find the car empty except for me and a crackhead who was mumbling obscenities to the bottle of ghetto grape soda that he couldn’t manage to twist open and the 50 cent bag of popcorn that kept slipping from his ashy ass hands…he didn’t REALLY want to kill me, he just wanted to shake me up a little as he suddenly leapt up screaming ‘bitch! all y’all bitches!’ at the top of his soot coated lungs and jabbing the air above my head with a filthy box cutter blade. there he was, the end of the line— with his blue and gray vomit encrusted timbs and his pathetic Panasonic tape player circa ‘82 swinging from his belt by its faux wooden handle, the volume turned up all the way, distorting jay-z’s voice so badly that it sounded like he was rapping through a sheet of plastic…

I looked up at him and through him and I told myself that he was just a fellow traveler, that this moment was just a station on our way and he was merely keeping me on my toes by cutting the air and shouting in my face, bringing me back to the surface and out from under my drug induced stupor. he didn’t want me to nap and miss out on any of life’s rich bounty, because, after all, life is good, life is what you get when you heed the conductor’s worried glance as he mouths the words “NOW! NOW!” through the door and despite yr wobbly knees you calmly get up and walk past the stumbling human wreck who just threatened you through to the next car, where there aren’t any crackheads just someone lying in a bundle, stinking like gin and bedhead and a kid in a filthy tommy Hilfiger jacket trying to sell a broken amp and a woman with huge, collagen enhanced lips and a makeup-less drag queen staring out into space and me, slumping to my seat, the buzz from my encounter wearing off as I returned to being sleepy and suicidal, but not enough to do something about it, not enough to have REALLY wished the crackhead stabbed me, just enough to have fantasized about it, which as all of us who write these goddamn internet diaries know, isn’t the same thing, not at all.