There’s nothing like a really bad February flu to remind you what a crumbum town this really is.
Thanks, neighbor, for shoveling the sidewalk. Really appreciate the effort. At least the Christmas lights still hanging from your gutter color the ice real nice on my walk home every night.
Thank you, driver, for honking at me in the crosswalk. Thank you for not stopping. Thank you for hitting the gas, for shrugging off stop signs and racing red lights, for hiding smugly behind your windshield, your steering wheel, your cellphone, your finger, you gutless, careless cocooned jagoff.
And thank you, pal, for letting me listen to your REALLY DISTORTED walkie-talkie cellphone conversation with Cookie the other day on the train. YES-CHIRP!-SHE’S MEETING YOU AT NATALIE’S!
I liked how when you and Cookie were done, you spent 20 minutes testing new ring tones so we could all hear them in violently tinny overamplitude. Was that mic, like, spec or’d you upgrade? The world’s silliest jambox!
To his maxed-out, fuzzy soundtrack, the city clattered by: The salt-stained Ike, its dirty brown berms strewn with garbage. An eight-mile debris field ushering visitors into the Loop. The train stopped and it started. The heater only half-worked. A parade of solo car commuters nudged along beside us in either direction, coming and going, the all-day rush hour in full swing.
When I was in my 20s and still wondering why everyone didn’t move to New York, a Manhattan refugee friend of mine said, Sure, the place is great but try living there when you’re sick. I used to think she meant that it was hard to be vulnerable in a sprawling and unforgiving place full of strangers. That it sucked walking or taking the subway to the doctor’s, surrounded by people who all looked and felt better than you.
Maybe, but that’s not really it. Being sick makes you vulnerable and self-despairing, but it also makes you acutely sensitive to the everyday people and places that crowd by, press down, box in, insult and hassle. It magnifies the casual malevolence and easy disregard that undergird our public lives together.
The SUV tailgater up nice and tight. The fake-sorry Whole Foods shopper with her battering ram cart and lousy, spoiled kids. The screw-you Blue Line rider who squeezes in before anyone’s gotten off. The malingering cab driver menace, an army of tired hit-and-run hacks swerving through traffic, crowding the curb, honking their horns in an offhand, angry chorus.
No wonder people own iPods.
We’re all sick of each other and the cold doesn’t help. But the truth is we are increasingly incapable of being polite. It’s a raw and rude era, made worse by our own retreat from public manners. A domino effect of thoughtlessness that begets thoughtlessness.
What you see with the flu, momentarily sapped and gut-rotten, is just how intractably far-gone we are.
The door let slam in another’s face, since who holds doors anymore?
The Red Line guy with his gym bag beside him, claiming two seats instead of one. Forget the canned recording urging us to Mind Our Fellow Passengers, he won’t meet your eye.
The woman at the movie theater staking out seats for 10, none of whom are there yet. No, no, those are taken-but remain empty for half the show.
Of course no one says anything. We just eat it and move on, and in an Up Yours century slowly stop giving a damn.
We come fully to inhabit this broken-down and frozen, pot-holed and dirty, people-choked, car-choked claustrophobic rat trap.
We go native.
