Outbound From Arlington Street

"All the lonely people, where do they all come from?" once enquired the Beatles. Well, it seems to me they come from those isolated, distant islands of Sony Walkman and iPod. The private worlds of personal stereo systems that invite you to spend hours listening to the Beatles rather than conversing with your neighbor. There was a rainbow, mostly pink, of such iPods on the subway this morning. An electric tram full of bobbleheads behind dark sunglasses. I was reading J. A. Baker's brilliant book The Peregrine for the second time, which, I suppose, at least in misanthropic terms, is just as bad. Everyone looked depressed and miserable.
Beside me there was an extremely attractive woman, a work of art made of flesh and hair, who by rights ought to have been descending from heaven instead of traveling by underground railroad. So self-conscious was she of being examined by the men on the train that she maintained a stiff and awkward posture for the entire journey, staring straight ahead at nothing in particular concentrating on her iTunes selections. Further along the car, about four or five seats away from Venus, a young African-American male in voluminous clothes slumped in a corner niche, his head double covered by a hood and low-brimmed baseball hat. Eyes downcast, staring fixedly at the floor, he quietly rapped along to his music, as if he were an exhausted monk saying his rosary, or a druid chanting some sacred charm of self-protection. Our fellow passengers either stared into their coffee cups, ruffled their newspapers, or stared into the blackness that sped by like a long, rich seam of coal in a mine.
We all resembled a collection of spiders, or so I decided, gathered together in a rusty drainpipe to hear the proceeding of some arachnid parliament. Because spiders are lonley creatures too. I don't recall ever witnessing two spiders together in the same web. As a rule, they are a solitary species. Unless, of course, I remembered, one of them is a Black Widow. Distracted too much by these thoughts and observations, I closed my book, slyly glancing over at the extremely attractive woman next to me, thinking: Black Widow or Itsy-Bitsy Spider, I wonder which is she?

Comments

[Lynn]

I don't have an iPod and I rarely run into anyone interested in conversing. If I do it's only about the weather or how slow the line is or whoever's on American Idol or some other lousy TV show that I don't watch. I need to get an iPod.

[adonis]

it aint easy being you, is it stephen?
Venus was probably blinded by your magnetic charms and too polite to stare. as a ancient god, i myself rarely go out in public, towering as i am in resplendency above the mortal throng.

[Kristin21]

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