They’ve been doing a lot of work in JFK, or at least they have been working a lot. You know how that is.

One of the more noticeable “upgrades” is the addition of two new emergency phones on the ghetto side of the station, under the expressway. That brings the total to four, within, like, a ten-foot radius. I’m not sure how to feel about this, frankly. It doesn’t inspire confidence in the safety of the station or the neighborhood, but I guess you gotta do what you gotta do.

It’s funny somehow. Of course, it’s not the MBTA’s fault that its buses and trains run through rough neighborhoods, but the differences between the stations in various neighborhoods is so exaggerated it can seem comical at times. Take the lighting in the Harvard Square T. It’s very moody down there, very noir. Personally I think they should take some of those prison lights they installed in Jackson Square on the orange line, and move them over to Harvard.

Because, seriously, the lighting in Jackson Square station is off the hook. The difference is, almost literally, night and day. You travel further out, to Stony Brook, say, and again, you’re in the dark. What do you suppose that’s about?

I saw not just one, but two of the most beautiful babies in the world today. There is almost nothing in nature as unsightly as an ugly baby, but nothing more beautiful than a beautiful one, or so it seemed to me today when I thought about it.

So my QOTD is for the ladies: can guys catch baby fever, too?

There was a little article in the Globe on the 25th, “Overall Crime is Reduced on MBTA” which is worth a read. Make sure you read all the way to the end, where it says:

“But some commuter advocates questioned whether the MBTA report painted a complete picture of safety on the system, and they pointed to several areas of crime that increased last year.

“The biggest jump came in the number of aggravated assaults, which climbed by 30 percent, from 130 in 2004 to 169 last year. Robberies — which involve physical force, unlike a wallet lifted from a pocket — also increased, as did burglaries, which involve break-ins, such as a car radio stolen from a T parking lot.”

This is just one of the many unsightly and potentially dangerous scenes of dilapidation at the shabby, sprawling JFK/UMass station.

This is right out front, by the way, in a high-traffic area under the insanely long and winding handicap ramp.

More unsightly and potentially dangerous scenes of delapidation to come!

I can’t even imagine how much those new and appallingly useless electronic signs at Downtown Crossing must have cost. Why not just put up an old-fashioned sign that reads: “No smoking.” Not that everybody doesn’t already know smoking’s prohibited. I mean, who doesn’t know that? And you probably can’t read if you don’t, anyway. And if you’re smoking down there and you do know, what good’s it do to have a sign flashing you’re not supposed to? It encourages it, is what it does. And why not flash it in Portuguese and Hindi and Cajun and Farsi?

And what else does the flashing sign say? “For info go to www.mbta.com.” Oh, thanks. Here’s an informative sign that very urgently tells you to go elsewhere for information.

And I’m absolutely sure no useful information will ever be conveyed by this flashy signage. But whatever.

Yesterday I was at Downtown Crossing for the evening rush hour. When I got to the platform, it was packed. And at least three trains came in the opposite direction, so, of course, when finally one lumbered in on my side of the tracks, it was obnoxiously crammed full of commuters. I decided to wait for the next, but you know how people are on Friday afternoon, wanting to get home and all. They were acting crazy. There was one creep on the platform with a briefcase shouting into the car: “move! Move your fat asses! You could get four more bodies in there! Move it!” And he was serious. I mean, he wanted to go home. And I can understand it, but come on.

There’s definitely a hierarchy of evils here, and making a spectacle of yourself in public is higher on the list of sins than not scrunching in sufficiently to allow someone who is making a spectacle of himself onboard. But the sense that entitlement trumps physics was also richly displayed in the incident. Several people simply would not allow the train to leave, although they could not get all the way in. I mean you’d think this was the Fall of Saigon, or something. Wait two freakin minutes, and there will be another train. What’s the emergency?

When finally the train was able to pull out, the wingnut who’d been making a scene, ran along the yellow line, knocking on the window at the passengers who had not heeded his orders to get their attention so he could give them all the finger. And the thing of it is, this freak was with two colleagues. Can you imagine working with somebody like that? I wonder what business they were in. They all three were middle-aged schlubs with briefcases, in their Dockers for dress-down Friday.

None of this excuses the irregularity of trains at rush hour, mind you. There is definitely malicious intent involved on the part of the T. I mean, one last slap in the face on a Friday just to show you who’s who and what’s what, right? But have a little dignity, people. Acting desperate only encourages them, after all.

As expected, not long after another train came, and it wasn’t nearly as packed. It was crowded, yes, but then it was rush hour on a Friday. You’re not gonna have the train to yourself. One thing that bugged me instantly when I got on—and I will admit up front it’s probably just me—was this tall dude who had a hand-held DVD player about the size of a book he was watching. Why does this bother me? I mean, it was about the shape and size of a book, and people reading books on the T definitely don’t bug me, so why should someone watching a DVD with headphones?

I don’t know, maybe it’s that 64% of twelfth graders are below proficient in reading. 26% are below basic. And according to Richard Restak, neuropsychiatrist and clinical professor of neurology at George Washington University Medical Center, author of Mozart’s Brain and the Fighter Pilot: Unleashing Your Brain’s Potential, a kind of user’s guide to your brain, watching TV really does turn your brain to mush. Alzheimer’s has been linked in studies to excessive time spent in passive pursuits, like watching TV. In fact, one particularly rigorous study compared seniors with and without Alzheimer’s, and found that “the only single activity in which Alzheimer’s patients on average significantly outperformed their counterparts was watching television.” Maybe someday it will be an Olympic sport, too, just like everything else. Links between too much TV and obesity? Aggression? ADHD?

But then, why should I care whose brain turns to mush in the end? For me, there’s something else to it. It’s that disconnect from reality. More than that, it’s a defiant disconnect. A repudiation of shared reality, of the concept of “here” and of “now” in which I have tremendous faith.

There’s such a wealth of stimulating reading out there, too. At the same time this dude was watching his DVD, I spied this chapter heading in a course packet the guy next to me was reading: “Situations and Circumstances Conducive to Sexual Intimacy.”

I’m just saying, reading can be informative and fun!

Read about it here.

COINAGE & KARMA. I got a free ride yesterday from JFK and I still don’t know why, but I wasn’t gonna ask. The token lady was outside her little booth, standing at the open gate, and I had my dollar out to get my token, but I guess she didn’t want to go back into her little booth to get me one just then. I consider it karma for a wait I had a couple years ago on the orange line, for which I wrote an email to the MBTA to get my fare reimbursed, and was told to go fuck myself.

THE EYES HAVE IT. I have definitely noticed that now that we’re officially into Spring, people are perking up a little. There’s been more eye contact out there in the last few days than there’s been in the past six months put together. People are funny. It’s still tentative, sometimes slightly teasing, rather curious than cocky at this point.

I spent many years in Budapest, and people there always make eye contact, and often stare brazenly on the subway. The staring used to bug me, but you get used to it. The eye contact on the street always gave me something to think about, though. On the one hand, it gave every outing an air of possibility, because each little interaction was a tale of its own, pregnant with possibility–visions of romance and violence, fantasies of intrigue–where did she come from? Where is he going? Was that an invitation in her eyes? Was that a threat in his? That’s what I have always loved about city life–that’s what’s missing from the suburbs. Fact is, in the suburbs, even if you make eye contact it’s in a familiar and thoroughly domesticated setting, like the supermarket or the post office, or the drive-thru from the safety of your car–and lacks that primal frisson of connection—and that vertiginous moment of “right now, if I look again, everything could change. Right now if I don’t look away, everything will change.”

Returning to Boston, I found it bugged me that you’d be passing somebody on the street and you’d be looking at them and they’d be looking at you, but you’d get about to where they were in focus, and they’d shift their gaze to the sidewalk. This is before there was any possibility of making real eye contact, mind you. Of course, in primates, the sustained gaze is a sign of dominance, while avoidance is a submissive or deferential gesture.

But here it seemed a sort of wholesale conflict-avoidance. The fact that the potential interaction was aborted seemed also to argue that people you encounter on the streets of Boston, for the most part, feel that conflict is the most likely outcome of interaction, at least with strangers on the street. Which is not so surprising, seeing as Boston is a city with a population widely stratified along social and economic lines. There also seems to be a lot of self-segregating due to race, class, and age, which is not so unusual, either. I think there’s probably more eye contact amongst strangers in cities that are racially and economically less stratified, more homogeneous.

Of course, psychologists and sociologists have a lot to say about these things. Scientists at the University of Wisconsin –Madison studying autism found that “in autistic subjects, the amygdala — an emotion center in the brain associated with negative feelings — lights up to an abnormal extent during a direct gaze upon a non-threatening face.” It could be that Bostonians have hyperactive amygdalas. Only compulsory mass MRIs can tell us for sure.

In New York City, in the days after 9/11, some psychologists-about-town, and at least one journalist(“gawker” Alex Kuczynski) noticed something: “In acts described by psychologists and sociologists as subliminal bonding consistent with wartime, instead of averting gazes when a stranger stood close, many New Yorkers made eye contact. The cultural historian Neal Gabler, who walked Manhattan’s streets for three days after Tuesday’s attack, said that New Yorkers have always cultivated the blank face. “It is an immunity mechanism, an emotional tax that you pay when you live in New York City,” he said. “Now, people have left it behind and are looking at each other with a different kind of civility, looking for some kind of contact.”

Kuczynski quotes Dr. Gordon Bower, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, on the result of millions of years of evolution in facial expression: “We are now able to pass on an emotional contagion, where one sad person can through their body and facial language pass on sorrow and grief to hundreds of other people,” he said. “It is an empathic, imitative response that even little children have.” Indeed, eye contact is so elemental even newborns seek it out.

But, yes, there are real dangers—but mostly inconveniences—associated with eye contact. I can’t deny it. I remember when I lived in Portland, Oregon. There was this big pockmarked homeless Indian in my neighborhood. I was working nights and he used to hang out in a doorway on my way to the bus stop. He was usually three sheets to the wind by the time I was getting to work. He was always very aggressive, demanding money or cigarettes, and because of his usual state of inebriation and his formidable stature, I found him threatening. I crossed the street to avoid him when I could. Whenever he accosted me I flashed him a look and grunted something. But one night I decided to just ignore him completely. This is something a lot of people do with beggars and bums on a crowded city street, but the less crowded it is, the more likely you are to provoke more of a reaction by ignoring them than if you just go ahead and acknowledge them. This was definitely the case with the pockmarked Indian. He flew into a rage, cursing me, throwing an empty bottle, shouting “Hey! HEY! I said ‘HEY!’” Demanding I acknowledge him. I didn’t. I hurried off to the bus stop, and made a note to try a different route from then on out.

Since that unpleasant incident, however, I always make it a point to acknowledge beggars, but I still don’t give them money. For many of mendicants it’s kind of a “gotcha!” game. If they can catch your eye, even for an instant, you lose, and owe them a buck, or whatever. This may be because of the empathy that eye contact seems naturally to engender. But I’ve been on skid row myself and never resorted to begging, so I feel like my empathy for the situation they’re in does not preclude a certain lack of sympathy for the solution they seem to have come up with.

Another danger in the city is that it seems like it’s mostly crazy people who aggressively seek out eye contact. I passed a mischievous-looking guy near the Pru yesterday, and knew I was in for something if our eyes met (but probably even if they didn’t). All it took was a glance as he was passing, and he barked: “John Lennon! Imagine!” at me. I laughed, and without breaking my stride, shouted back: “Double Fantasy, baby!” and passed without incident. He shouted over his shoulder back at me: “You got a fat wallet!” But what he took for a wallet was actually my leather-bound Moleskine notebook, which I often keep in my back pocket.

IN OTHER WORLDS. Anyway, at JFK there were two Asian students, one looked like one of those happy fat Buddhas, talking with great enthusiasm about some computer role-playing game. The whole way to Park Street. You know how people who are really into that sort of thing are. I mean, they can bang on forever about the different characters, their morphology, and their magical qualities. And listening to them, you’d swear it was all very real.

At Broadway, it probably was, an interesting character got on. He looked like he was maybe a Vietnam Vet, wearing what looked almost like a sort of paramilitary uniform. He had on those strangely-fitted pants your school custodian used to wear, the ones that were made out of indestructible rayon. Sensible shoes. A black SWAT-like vest, with some sort of walkie-talkie-like devise attached that would issue bursts of static at fairly regular intervals, prompting him to minutely adjust the volume with controlled competence. He wore a black baseball cap with the emblem of the Dept. of Public Safety Texas Rangers on it, pulled down so low you could not see his eyes, and, in fact, his bearded face was completely obscured. He may have been wearing Unibomber shades, too. Still, I felt like he was on our side, somehow.

Watching him, I thought, aside from the fact that his trousers are too short, and are exposing his white and red-striped (but matching) tube socks, he’s in an absolutely airtight world of his own construction there. OK, to some extent we all are, but his was hermetically sealed, with its own set of signs and symbols intelligible to none but him.

Then, the next stop, a mother got on with four little boys, all around fivish, sixish, sevenish. I think three were hers, because they looked just like her. And they were all lovely. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Squirrely, but in a Beatrix Potter kind of way. The crazies shrank from them immediately, of course, but the boys themselves were so completely good-natured and innocent, they didn’t shrink back from the crazies.

You could tell riding the T was this big adventure for them. And they were bold explorers, watching the goings on with fearless, utterly unselfconscious, good-natured curiosity. And genuinely cute kids are few and far between, let me tell you. But all four of them were delightful.

10,000 JOANS.After the gym I dropped into the Boston Public Library. There’s an exhibition, 10,000 Joans, upstairs in the McKim Building through June 15th. The exhibition, consisting of Joan of Arc memorabilia I guess you’d call it, hints at something, but with no program, brochure, or guide accompanying it, and very little explanatory signage, you’re left to sort it out on your own. There are guided tours, and I’m interested enough in the subject matter to take time out for one. (The exhibition’s title is a bit misleading, though. The number of Joans on display is in the hundreds, not thousands. I think the ten thousand figure comes from the complete collection, impossible to display, obviously, all at once, in the gallery space available.)

Because, truly, the story of Jeanne d’Arc is such a compelling one on so many levels: religious, yes, but cultural and political even more so. Americans don’t always get the deep, enduring significance of national saints in Europe. Sainte Jeanne is, of course, patron saint of France, and as such a symbol of French history and identity on some levels. Does the exhibition explore this? I couldn’t tell.

One thing the exhibition hints at is the incredible appeal and the richness of the material devoted to her story. Up to the present day. But here again, an exhibition of this size can’t even hope to scratch the surface. It did not include any reference to the French military’s helicopter Carrier that bears her name, Jacques Dror’s distinctive Art Nouveau-inflected church in Nice (that has been nicknamed “the meringue” by local critics), or depictions of her by cheeky French artists Pierre et Gilles. This is partly a limitation of an exhibition of an idiosyncratic private collection rather than a more systematic exploration of any certain theme. As a collection of artifacts it’s interesting enough, I guess.

One of my favorite books that takes Joan of Arc as its subject is Michel Tournier’s Gilles et Jeanne. By the way. In fact, I’d recommend about anything by Tournier for a good read.

My, but this has turned into some kind of lengthy discourse, hasn’t it? I will have to save my observations of my orange line journey home for another time. Until then, au revoir, mes petites grenouilles.

Yesterday on the T on my way to “work” it was like a slow motion underwater ballet. It was one of those mornings when none of the trains ever got up to full-speed, so that it felt like it took about a half an hour to go one stop.

Later I had business at Boston Medical Center, and since I was going from my gym on the orange line I got off at Mass Ave., and walked the rest of the way. It’s always quicker than the bus. Always. Even if the transfer goes off without a hitch, traffic is always snarled around there. I have raced the bus before, and won walking.

Same going home from BMC, down Mass Ave. It’s a pretty desolate strip. If you just resign yourself to walking it’s not a problem, and you’re always sure to meet some interesting folks along the way. You can run some errands, too. Why not? If you like crack, you can pick some of that up, and then drop into South Bay Shopping Center for some Drāno, or whatever you wash it down with.

I stopped into the shopping center on my way home to pick up some oranges. I left the Stop-n-Shop, and was standing right outside the door, putting my big bag of oranges in my backpack when an old Mexicano drove by in a beat-up blue minivan, wagged his finger at me, gave me the evil eye, and then drove off.

You know, whatever.

It’d been kind of a long day, and I was not in the mood for magical realism, so I did my best to just ignore the whole incident. But it has continued to annoy me, even twenty-four hours later.

Some interesting issues are brought up in this week’s Dig. For example, the issue of expectoration. That’s what the pros call spitting, kids. I don’t want to brag, but I have a friend who is currently in training for Beijing ‘08! At least he seems to be, since every time I see him he expels about forty pounds of phlegm from the back of his throat over the course of an hour or so. I have to admit, his technique is impressive.

But the city doesn’t see it that way. It discriminates against expectorationists. Regardless of their skill level, there’s a potential twenty dollar fine for spitting on the streets of Boston. The other day we were strolling along the avenue, and by my count my friend racked up $3,280.00 from one end of Newbury Street to the other. I mean, of course, he wasn’t fined, but if he had been, we probably could not have afforded dinner and drinks that night.

I think about the only thing that takes more skill on the street is the Farmer’s Blow. It’s like the Nordic Combined of post-nasal drip relief techniques.

This week’s issue of the Boston Courant (serving Back Bay, Beacon Hill, Fenway and South End) features a fascinating front page story: “Wealthiest Bostonians Are Our Neighbors”. Pictures of Boston’s billionaires, and approximate addresses are provided. All for free! So pay your rich neighbors a visit! I’m sure they’ll be happy to welcome you in (re-gift a fruit basket or a cheap bottle of wine, though, just to be neighborly).

Check this out.

You know, they should be paying us.