a morning ride

Morning in the Moscow metro. Waves of commuters flood onto the station platform, standing five deep in expectation of an approaching train, everyone jockeying for position to be in the most strategic position when the doors open. And no matter that the trains run every 60-90 seconds, the tide of humanity seems never to ebb. Like desperate survicors of a shipwreck, frantically bailing out their lifeboat only to watch in horror as the water slowly climbs to the gunwales.

While riding on the metro this morning, feeling an intense hatred for this passive, compliant mass of humanity crushing my internal organs and doing my best to hold my arms stiff by my side to give myself a few inches of breathing room, a woman boarding the train audibly inhaled and then flung herself into the crush. Once safely ensconed, she exhaled even louder and her entire squat body seemed to expand, apparently adopting the blowfish technique for creating personal space.

Not long after, a man wearing a stiff, almost polished brown leather jacket and sporting a shaved head to hid his receding hairline looked at me and snarled something while gesturing for me to move over into the fraction of an inch of free space to our right. I looked him in the eye and with a flash of murderous rage surely passing over my face told him that I don't understand a word you just said, but go fuck yourself is probably an apporpriate reply. Whatever culutral exchange we were on the brinking of having stopped abrubtly at that moment and he was left to perhaps wonder about the astronomical odds of being threatned by a huge foreigner on his ride to work that particular morning while I was left to imagine what life in a Russian prison might be like should I choose to kill this guy. That act of transcendtal meditation thankfully pulled me back from that precipice.

Except for me and my new found friend, however, everyone else on the train looked bitterly resigned to their situation. The Soviets either were blessed to stumble upon the most docile and submissive race of people in the world or more than 70 years of bread lines, housing shortages, cramped Kruschevy life, and the pervasisve threat of informers had broken their will. But unravelling the cause/effect relationship in that equation is probably a bit like untangling a rat's nest of fishing line while wearing oven mitts. I tried to imagine New Yorkers packing themselves into a subway car like the Moscovites. I had a vision of a NYC subway train pulling into a station, the doors sliding open, a wave of human fury pouring out, heading in the direction of city hall where they would burn the place down before hanging the mayor and the entire city council from the Brooklyn Bridge. After which citizen action committees and non-profit organizations would form to unleash an unprecendeted campaign of public outcry. But for whatever reason, Moscowvites display no such righteous indignation, instead choosing to wear faces of perpetual glumness as their form of protest.