Public Transportation

Whatever happened to the simple joys of public transportation? To watching the abandon track through your right hand window as it begins to disintegrate, then pull itself back together and disintegrate once more? If you watch the disconnected rails and the rotting rail ties long enough, you begin to wonder whether the track you are traveling on isn’t beginning to rot and fall apart too.  Instead, you are distracted by a Snapple commercial playing out on the HD TV directly in front of you.  There are about six of these TVs in your train car alone, I might add.  How can you help but be distracted?  Where there used to be a friendly smattering of guttural morning chatter and gruff ‘Good Mornings,’ there is now silence and the pristine automated voice, cautioning you to “Watch your step when exiting.”  Neighborly nods and smiles are replaced with vacant stares of kids plugged into iPods and the downcast eyes glued to eBooks. 

            Now I have nothing against eBooks, I brought my Nook so that I could read on the train, but I do expect a little more from my occasional experience of the early morning commute on public transportation.  And moreover, it takes me less than a glance to realize that the man beside me is reading either a Harlequin Romance novel or something of an even lower class of reading materials. 

            But pardon me. 

            I do tend to be more than a tad cantankerous with the modern era.  I was born into the midst of all this technology and advancement about twenty-one years ago, and I’ve resented it ever since.  Not that I don’t like technological advancement and the joys of instant gratification; I actually love it.  I’m addicted to it.  And that is what bothers me.  At times, I wish I could have one dull, utterly useless moment in a day.  But I seem to lack the patience or the where-with-all for such nonsense.  The minute I come to a standstill, out whips my iPhone, and voila: no more dull moment, no more waiting for the pause in the conversation to pick back up naturally.  Patience is a luxury unaffordable to the iPhone addicts, media druggies and me-aholics of my generation.