Musings from Afar

On the concourse you experience humanity. It jumps out at you as you keep your hands in your pockets and your eyes forward. You can sit thirty floors up in your office, away from the noise and the aroma of life gone foul but it will eventually drift upwards or you downwards. I dive into the moving ocean of the street, weaving my way around the waddlers, the arm-swingers, the creepers, the pickpockets and the assholes. I avoid everyone and everything, passing the poor blacks wandering with sidewalk stains on their backs, past the poor children who should probably be in school, past the white office women with huge asses and rehashed stories, clinging to their last ideal which you can't fully comprehend, past the bald businessmen in blue shirts and yellow ties who want nothing more than to have these others disappear, past the sidewalk musicians blowing their instruments for an unseen audience, working not for pocket change but to keep things moving, constant. Homeless people walk up to me hopelessly, trying to make eye contact or to obtain acknowledgement of their existence but I do not comply. The taxi driver pulls his bumper next to my knee, waiting for me to exit his life while idle minds sitting on benches resent all of us with shining shoes. The buses never stop their patrol of the sea, carting the hopeless poor and the hopeful working towards their inevitable destiny, emitting plumes of foul smoke to cover the stench of decaying humanity and urine. A man jumps out from the shadows: "Hey big guy, two minutes of your life to save another, hey big guy?" No thanks, big guy. You might see a few pigeons on the ground pecking away at whatever crumbs the street people may have left behind, but they mostly watch from above as the frenzy ensues below. The smell of the street creeps into my nostrils. It is nauseating and foul and there is nothing I can do except hold my breath to escape to the essence of lives piled on top of each other in close quarters, confined in a jar for all to see from afar. A street person walks in front of me slowly and I try to walk around. He and his grizzled beard won't let me. It is his street, his sidewalk, his air and his stench. He is the city and I am a visitor. He wears the history of his life on his snow-stained pants and his new goodwill shoes. I drown in the vision of him and his smell and I want to run; back to the office building, away from the street people, the pissed off contruction workers, the people handing out flyers, the ineffective protestors and most of all the smell. I walk past the the suit-clad visitors, the angry white and asian people, the false aristocrats of this miserable serfdom, and head into an elevator filled with women who pretend that nothing they just experienced affected them in the slightest. They talk absently about salads and how well their bosses treat them and how much their husbands adore them while I watch the floor indicator change steadily. The elevator closes in and my tie becomes tighter as quacking goes on behind me. I am suffocating in life. Finally the door opens and I am back in my perch, away from the madness below.