Automation

One million asses, repeatedly sitting and standing, lying and rising, squishing foam of the train seats until a tattered thin, velvet crunched square of blue and orange plaid fabric is all that remains, serving no more of a purpose than to decorate the 1970's schoolroom beige plastic bucket seats.  And it smells like some combination of sweat, piss, and perfume mixed with remnants of vomit and grease from sticky weekend nights where the drunks and the kids rode up and down till dawn.
The train is a vessel.  Chicago trains are relics.  They have too much traffic to shut down for renovation and the city's too poor (and/or cheap) to afford it anyway.  Sloshing around in a sea of reverberations, head phone speakers, highly dramatic telephone conversations, pip-pop-popping Spanish postulations, and sometimes heated Polska mother-daughter confrontations, till the rails screech and rattle to a stop and voice recorded directions tell us passengers what to do and where we're going, interrupted by a disgruntled conductor who reaffirms the automation and also reaffirms everyone's desire to just get off and go... anywhere.
The political environment is hot and the economical environment has chilled down a bit, for me, at least.  Rush Limbaugh preaches and fills the minds of young successful professionals with minutia of irrelevant falsities, when a kid driving a Maserati's main concern should be little Andy Drummer.
He's an eighteen-year-old kid moving out of his parents' house for the first time, unassisted, rebelliously even, and as he drives that U-Haul truck, he realizes within the first mile on I-90 that he's not comfortable behind the thick rubber Mayflower styled captain's wheel.  In a desperate attempt to exit, cutting over two lanes of traffic like the blade of a knife sliding off a potato and into an oppressive index finger, little Andy Drummer drives the nose of a black Maserati into a divider off of the California exit.
Pulverized glass, twisted steel and a thin trail of engine smoke rest on the divider from the shattered Italian sports car.  The U-Haul went skidding on its side down the exit, screeching like the rails beneath my feet, a violent war between metal and concrete and neither side was backing down when finally a firm street light forced a treaty and stopped the machine.
I watched the scene unfold from my moving picture window, looking back until it disappeared and then forgot about it.  See, in a city this big there's too much tragedy and death to pay attention to.  So, you keep your eyes forward and worry about the people and space immediately affecting you. Like Jimmy Carlisle who walked down Ashland Avenue for ten blocks, heard two gun shots, one thudded, screaming death and still managed to buy flowers for his newly pregnant girlfriend.
The story came on the news, he didn't recall a thing.  It's why cell phones and iPods and portable privacy devices are so popular and viral.  They provide enough stimulation and distraction to remove one from an unfavorable situation, say the commute on the train and then you start checking it at home and after you get out of the shower and before you go to bed and before you know it you're waking up in the middle of the goddamned night , waiting for a response from some fleeting, nebulous relationship (do we have those anymore?) wondering why they haven't responded.  
Meanwhile, the clock in the living room ticks steady, on and on and on.