Not as in get­ting funky, but as in not get­ting blown up on the sub­way. You know how every time there’s a ter­ror­ist attack, the media tricks some res­cue worker or unfor­tu­nate bystander into using the phrase “body parts every­where”, which they can then mor­bidly quote with rel­ish? The next batch of human soup you can hear about just may well be New York chunky style.

So no movie review this time. A lit­tle like HtMT, I usu­ally don’t use this blog to talk about me me me, but some shit is goin’ down in New York City right now that I feel like writ­ing about.

Before after­noon rush hour yes­ter­day, Mayor Bloomberg and the Chief of Police held a press con­fer­ence to report the feds had uncov­ered cred­i­ble evi­dence (the feds claim oth­er­wise) of a coör­di­nated attack of between 12–20 bombers on the sub­way sys­tem, per­haps as soon as that day (yes­ter­day). Even bet­ter, the plot is tied to mal­con­tents in Iraq (duh), and while mil­i­tary forces are car­ry­ing out top secret mis­sions in Bagh­dad to foil the plot, we’re sup­posed to go on our jolly way rid­ing the sub­way as normal.

Just like Bloomberg him­self pledges to do. Whereas just min­utes before, he said “It was more spe­cific as to tar­get, it was more spe­cific as to tim­ing.” Do the math! So nat­u­rally he’ll be rid­ing the sub­way. It’s when he checks his watch and gets off that I’d be worried.

I walk home through Cen­tral Park when­ever pos­si­ble dur­ing the sum­mer. It’s rea­son #384 why I heart NY. By early Octo­ber it’s dark and chilly before I leave work. So before the news broke, I was already debat­ing whether or not I would take the sub­way home. And then upon walk­ing out the door of my office build­ing, I saw a car­a­van of black SUV’s rolling through mid­town. Not an unusual sight in a city hous­ing the United Nations, but what was strange this time was their haste, the sirens, and the tinted win­dows actu­ally open. For once I finally got to see who’s inside those things: impos­ing mus­cle men in suits scowl­ing out at pedes­tri­ans. I decided right then and there that I would def­i­nitely walk home. I had a lovely scenic walk through the park at dusk, but this morn­ing opted to ride the train back to work.

As puz­zled media out­lets have been report­ing, New York­ers have not been stay­ing away in droves. Peo­ple need the sub­way; the city doesn’t func­tion with­out it. Only rich peo­ple live in a strata where pub­lic trans­porta­tion is just some­thing that rum­bles beneath your feet occasionally.

But the sub­way is wide open to attack; I don’t care what city offi­cials claim. Frankly, I don’t under­stand why any­one hasn’t bombed it already. In a Lon­don shocked by the first seri­ous bomb­ing in years since the IRA cooled it, more per­pe­tra­tors pulled off another one just when you’d think the bob­bies would have been more alert than ever. Luck­ily the bombs lit­er­ally fizzled.

There are cam­eras all over the city (traf­fic cams, ATMs, build­ings’ secu­rity sys­tems… it’s said any New Yorker is pho­tographed at least once every cou­ple of min­utes). But unless there’s some more advanced big-brother sur­veil­lance sys­tem that I don’t know about, the sub­way is just sit­ting there, ask­ing for it. NYC has slowly but steadily been phas­ing out human-staffed entrances to the sub­way in favor of Metro­card (dis­pos­able smart­cards you buy from vend­ing machines) turn­styles. Today there’s a cop at every sub­way sta­tion, but there are usu­ally sev­eral entrances to each sta­tion, and they are typ­i­cally at least one block long. There are lit­er­ally dozens of unguarded entrances where you could enter car­ry­ing a giant pink polka-dotted nuclear war­head and a plac­ard read­ing “HEY LOOK AT ME I’M CARRYING A WARHEAD”.

Bloomberg also urges us to be on the look­out. What for? There’s at least one of every­thing on the sub­way. I say that with affec­tion, not out of racism, sex­ism, sex­ual orientation-ism or any other –ism. This is New York #%$&in’ City, for #%$&‘s sake!

Last night I lived through an extended dream, many details of which fled upon wak­ing, but I do recall some large cat­a­clysmic attack. As on 9/11, I was safely dozens of blocks away, but unlike 9/11, peo­ple I actu­ally knew died and my guilt was so over­pow­er­ing I cried in my dream. It’s dis­turb­ing that my brain per­son­al­ized today’s events so much; I never thought my survivor’s guilt from 9/11 was any­where near in the leagues of peo­ple who were actu­ally there and made it out, or per­son­ally knew some­one who did. A few weeks ago, I watched a movie that included footage of the planes hit­ting and the tow­ers col­laps­ing. It had prob­a­bly been years since I had seen it, and even then I only saw it on TV like every­one else in the world (I was about 70 blocks away). I’m not really sure how to describe how it felt to see again, but it’s a lit­tle like I do right now.