The past presents the future.

"There's a hole in my neighborhood down which of late I cannot help but fall." - Elbow

"What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace."  - Joan Didion, "On the Morning After the Sixties"


When the L train goes above ground, the first thing you see is a cemetery. The train pulls into the Wilson Avenue stop in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the only station of the 468 in the New York subway to have one platform inside and the other direction outdoors. Along with the E, the cars of the L are the most modern of the system and at this hour of the day I am one of the few people heading deeper into Brooklyn, so my hungover eyes linger not on the fellow passengers slouched against rails but on absence and the blanket advertisements for Google that monopolize this particular car. The promotions for Chrome push a special feature that allows for private sessions so your browsing history isn't recorded. Our right to privacy being dangled back to us as incentive in the dystopian present. As for my present, I'm rapidly becoming a parody of myself, beginning my third trip in 11 days. A weekend in Los Angeles following 2-day stints in Montreal and DC all for supposed relaxation and pleasure. But if there ever was any to be garnered it's not visible from where I am sitting at 8 a.m. in an empty car of the most modern design the MTA offers with 2 sleeping passengers for companionship, enveloped in Orwellian marketing complete with stick figures to ensure our minds don't miss its simple points and all I have for distraction, for escapism in a world of perpetual escape, are the malaise essays of '70s Didion and in a scratched plexiglass reflection the cemetery comes into view behind me.


My transfer is at Broadway Junction and I take the steep staircase, a packed escalator of motionless people descending beside me in a steady fall. The A train continues my journey back beneath ground and the express passes empty stations of linoleum that I can tell by the font of their names are from the last quarter of the Twentieth Century, the rooms leaning toward a brand of future that never came. By the time the A goes above ground I feel almost grateful, even if the blue skies and Indian Spring of the last 2 days has gone back to a grey ceiling of anonymous time, both of hour and decade.  As the train continues toward JFK it passes something I've never seen or just forgot existed because the only thing stranger in that moment than seeing a casino in outer Brooklyn is seeing one at 8:30 in the morning. Off that subway, it's then to the AirTrain at Howard Beach and its anachronistic patch of marsh, the reeds and monochrome water hemmed between the subway platform and the monorail as a dim reminder to what this land once was. Stepping off the AirTrain I walk through corridors out of a Kubrick film and look out the windows toward JetBlue's Terminal 5, a brand new structure of concrete and glass that looks most like someone picked the Lotus Temple out of Delhi to transplant here and it wilted mid-journey. And I can see the check-in counters on the level below and the balcony above them, upon which a TV crew has set up chairs and an attractive aging blonde is interviewing a man with this stark setting as backdrop, and I know that they're talking but I can't hear what they're saying.