HERE. Let’s hope the legislature overrides Romney’s veto, which merely adds insult to injury.

I met an out-of-town friend on Newbury Street for coffee the other day, walking from the BPG to Starbuck’s behind the woman above. She was moving at a pretty good clip for someone loaded down like a pack mule. But you know how high-powered boutique shopping pumps up those adrenaline levels. And the more outrageously useless and overpriced the goodies are, the headier the rush. This chick was possessed. Maybe she had a shot of testosterone, or something. She must have strutted the whole length of Newbury Street showing off her booty (the pun was unfortunately unavoidable, given the circumstances).

Of course, it’s entirely possible there was nothing at all in those bags, and she was either a paid advertisement (however ill-advised) for the shops along Newbury Street, or (a little more likely) a bag lady collecting recyclable plastic water bottles on the sly. You just never know.

She seemed proud, but there was something shabby about her, sad to say. Too many bags, no one to carry them for her. Does she really think that’s something to be proud of?

People have clearly lost their minds. What tiny little minds they had to begin with.

Here’s something. I happened to pick up Metro last week–I think this was Tuesday or Wednesday, and I thought I had an op-ed in it (about Ralph Reed–but the editor was apparently skittish about some of the content–asked me for sources and everything, then never ran it–you can read it HERE, but it’s nothing special)–so on the op-ed page they have this thing called “Today’s Debate!” where they ask your schmoes, shmegeges, shlemiels, and shmendriks on the street what they think about something they’ve obviously never thought about.

Tuesday’s looked like this:

Now, as someone who lives in Dorchester, which is not a world away, by the way, I take umbrage at this willful Allstonian ignorance. Could they possibly have found three whiter, WASPier wankers to ask about urban violence? I’ll tell you what happened here. The reporter was too afraid to go to those “certain neighborhoods” Jennifer (who apparently has no last name–she’s like the Cher of Chelsea) seems to have maybe possibly heard that some of the alleged violence in Boston was “centralized” in.

The WASPiest answer was “You just need to be smart about where you go and what time you go there.” I think they left out the end of the quote, probably something like …to buy your crystal meth and cruise for rough trade.

It’s sad that Boston is so Balkanized people in one neighborhood doubt there really is a problem in the next one over. It’s true, as Jennifer says, that it’s concentrated in certain neighborhoods. But that doesn’t mean it’s not the whole city that suffers when violence erupts. Or that it’s not in our interest to examine what’s really happening (and, yes, it’s as bad as people make it out to be), why, and how we can stop it.

It’s not that far from Dot Ave to the Newbry, you know.

I am all set to meet with Margie Lynch and Holly Richardson of the Department of Conservation and Recreation the morning of August 18th. Margie also suggested I contact the Tri-Park Neighborhood Association, which I have done through a Yahoo! group, although I am wary of Neighborhood Associations in general.

The purpose of the meeting, which will take place in the park itself at 10:30 a.m., is to discuss some possible landscaping/beautification/maintenance projects for the park and playground. Anyone interested or with ideas is welcome to come, or email me here if you can’t but still want to give your two cents.

More on the T’s automated fare innovations HERE.

Two or three times a week, when I’m working from home and have nothing in the larder, except the emergency provisions our vigilant governor has urged us all to keep on hand (several liters of bottled water and a variety 12-pack of ramen noodles, some duct tape, and The Book of Mormon), I amble over to the nearest Dunkin Donuts for my Bavarian cream fix. Say what you will, I’m not ashamed. I am a cream queen, and proud of it. I mean, a donut’s eighty-nine cents whether there’s just a hole full of air in the middle (hold it up to your ear and you can hear the wind whistling through it) or a hole filled with pudding. HELL-O. Is this an intelligence test? I’ll take door number two, Monty.

But the great thing about my Dunkin Donuts, roughly at the intersection of Mass Ave and Columbia Road, is that along with your Bavarian Cream and coffee, you get your daily recommended dose of DESPAIR, absolutely free of charge. Jesus God, that place is Desperation Central.

I mean, first of all you’ve got all these people rushing to get to their dead-end jobs. There are little acts of kindness, of course–a big, burly construction worker type (rowr!) held the door open for me this morning, as an entry-level schlub tried to shove his way past me–but even the kindness has the poignant feel of politeness between doomed seamen (oops–there’s that cream again) aboard the Lusitania.

But the real misery is behind the counter. Always new faces, always the same look of doom on them. Doing things is definitely not what they like to do. Nope. The thing that gives me that extra kick on the way to my daily existential crisis is that the despair is always fresh (like the coffee and donuts), and there are so many varieties to choose from.

This morning, for instance, the young woman behind the counter was overly affectless. Overly unresponsive to any attempt at human kindness. She seemed to have a force-field of affectlessness all around her to repel even the most minor acts of compassion one might feel compelled to engage in on her beleaguered behalf.

I want to be clear: I believe–really it is the cornerstone of my “belief system,” if you will–in the sacred autonomy of each individual. This belief has many implications that I won’t get into at the moment. I don’t for a moment think that this young woman’s job at Dunkin Nonuts entails fulfilling some psychic need of customers for some semblance of humanity along with their purchase. This young woman is obviously not present inasmuch as she can not be present while being present, and is likely not paid enough to be fully present. With her aggressive affectlessness she says to her customers: I will use certain of my body parts to fulfill certain simple requests, but I will not use my soul. And a customer has no right to ask it.

She is, of course, working out her own answer to the old mind-body problem. I would say, from my brief interaction with her this morning, that she’s probably your average, garden-variety substance-dualist. It was not mixing well with my physicalistic-monist mood, though. If they had been out of bavarian cream donuts, there could have been an ontological rift into which all of existence would have been spontaneously sucked.

Not to say that existence sucks.

And so another day begins.

My blogorythms, after peeking around June 6th, are back in a valley. I have no rage these days. The last time I got rage fatigue this bad was back in early May, when I posted my first rage fatigue notice. This time it’s partly to do with the heat-wave we just had, I’m sure. It was too damn hot to get up in arms over anything. I mean, just thinking cool thoughts made you break a sweat, never mind waving your arms, writhing around, wailing and gnashing your teeth.

I also think I shot my rage-wad on the lead-up to that awful MBTA hearing. What a cynical, utterly futile process that was. And as I said soon afterwards, I knew I’d have to hang back “in seclusion” and “regroup.” As silly as it was, it was all a little too activist for me. I’m all for talking the talk and walking the walk, but activism is kind of like speed-walking, and people usually look just as ridiculous doing it. I decided back in the Spring to basically “vote with my feet,” and I have been very happily pedaling all around the city ever since, through the theft of one bike, and a rusty old loner. I am now on my third in about as many months–and should this one go the way of the others, I will get a fourth. Nothing can stop me. I think in the last four months I’ve spent about seven-fifty on the T, and that only very, very grudgingly. never mind that I have spent about seven-hundred-fifty on bikes. I am hoping I will, in the end, deprive the T of at least that much. And it’s not that I don’t believe in mass transit. On the contrary. It’s that I don’t believe in the T.

I found it amusing, somehow, that after the Big Dig collapse, the local TV news was really pushing the T as a viable alternative. I can see an alternative. Yes. But not a viable one. That’s stretching it way beyond credibility. I mean, who are we trying to fool here? Well, obviously people who never use the T, and with good reason. But you knew that the truth would eventually out.

I enjoyed watching reporters trying to find some T-rider who would sing the T’s praises. The only one they could come up with, that I saw, was a tourist, who said she loved the Silver Line and that it was efficient and cheap. Well, we know that it’s different for tourists, that they can shrug off an inconvenience or two over the course of a couple of days. It’s sort of like the difference between the common cold and chronic emphysema. If it’s terminal, and you have to live with it every day, it starts to wear on you, you start looking for some miracle cure. I mean, sooner or later you get desperate.

So, even before the heat-wave came along and crushed even the tourists’ sense of goodwill, the commuter lines had buckled. The lesson? Just because the Big Dig is a miserable gazillion dollar fiasco doesn’t mean The MBTA isn’t, too.

And now everyone knows it for sure. Julia Talcott of Newton summed it up in a letter in today’s Glob:

OUR OUT-OF-TOWN friend took the MBTA to the Science Museum with two small children last Tuesday . At the Chestnut Hill station they found they did not have the six dollars in change needed to board the train. They tried unsuccessfully to get it from the only establishment within walking distance . When they called in desperation, we drove the change over to them. Once they were on the train, the trip took an hour.

Leaving from Science Park for the return trip, they found themselves surrounded by tourists looking for tokens or change. There were token machines covered in bubble wrap, lying inert inside the station. The trip back took an hour. They returned exhausted.

The trip by car usually takes 30 minutes round trip without traffic. Is it any wonder Bostonians prefer to drive when they can?

The T’s Silver Line may be coming to the rescue of airport travelers. Could the MBTA make it easier for those who want to get in and out of the city?

Wouldn’t it have been great if all the misspent money on the Big Dig had been used to overhaul the MBTA?

But it’s not always gratifying to know that people now know what you knew all along, especially when it doesn’t change anything. I mean, it’s like this woman says, wouldn’t it have been great if even a fraction of the grossly inflated cost of the Big Dig had gone to improving the MBTA? (Yes, I know that part of the deal was that improvements would be made to the MBTA, and they’ve been largely delivered, but I’m talking real, systemic improvements and upgrades, not little tit-for-tat projects here and there–and I’m talking billions in investment, not millions.)

Now, ironically, even more money’s been appropriated for the Big Dig from the projected budget surplus of somewhere between a hundred and two hundred million to go over the entire system and redo what it cost $10.5 billion more than it should have to do wrong in the first place. So far it’s another twenty million bucks down the hole on account of corruption and incompetence–but I’m confident it will be ten times more in the end–and rest assured it’s going right back into the pockets of the pigs whose shoddy work caused the collapse.

By the way, that twenty million (so far) would have covered almost a third of the T’s FY07 shortfall. By the time this crisis is past, they’ll have spent more than enough on it to have bailed out the T, I’m sure.

It’s not only money, though. In both cases it’s the culture of obfuscation, cronyism and corruption within these organizations, and the contractors they use, that’s to blame for troubles that sometimes, inevitably, turn tragic.

While Lee Matsueda and TRU soldier on with their “action alerts,” God love ‘em, there’s very little hope for their cause. Because there’s just no money in not raising fares, and there’s no real political price to pay for raising them, either. Suck it up, Boston. You’re used to it, anyway.

From here in my blogofunk I think it’s all pretty shrugworthy. Frankly, if you feel you’ve got no other choices in transportation in Boston, then you’re right.

I was riding my bike in Back Bay yesterday a little after noon. I was headed down Dartmouth, towards Copley Square when one of those Back Bay slacker-temp type jaywalking schlubs sucking on his jumbo iced coffee, plugged into his ‘Pod, stepped out in front of me without looking first. Boston needs a Rudy Giuliani. But more on that in a minute.

I swerved to avoid him, of course. Since he had not looked in the direction of traffic before crossing, and therefore was not aware I was already right on top of him, I swerved right, behind him. But at the last possible moment he saw me, and, startled, staggered backwards. I had to slam on the brakes, which sent my back wheel up, and me flying over the handlebars.

So there I am on my back in the middle of Dartmouth Street, arms and legs akimbo, my bicycle lying on top of me. I look up at this guy looking down at me. He’s like, “oops, my bad.”

I don’t know which was worse: his stepping cluelessly out in front of me, or his looking down at my mangled form after causing me to crash, and quoting “Clueless” to me.

So that set me off. First of all, people: “my bad” is not an apology. Unless you’re, like, three years old, and you’ve just pooped your pants. But not when you are a thirty-something office temp who has just nearly killed someone through your zombie jaywalking on your way back to your data entry job from Dunkin Donuts with your fifth coolata of the day. No.

You might not have been aware of this: “my bad” actually reached a critical mass yesterday afternoon, but this noxious example of rampant anthimeria has been gaining speed for years. Although there’s some confusion about its origin and etymology, the likeliest culprit is, unlikely as it seems, Manute Bol, the impossibly tall Sudanese NBA player whose native tongue is Dinka. He reportedly used to say it whenever he flubbed a pass. It apparently spread through the college basketball subculture (such as it is), emerging in the print press in ‘89 (first in the St. Louis Dispatch, and then, days later, in USA Today). From there, in the mid-nineties, it made its way into TV (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and movies (Clueless, where it is, coincidentally, used by a character who has just caused a cyclist to crash). By the noughties, it had become the punchline in late night comedians’ monologues, which is where most of corporate America gets what pseudo-original thoughts it has. I’m quite sure that when Mr. Bush is finally indicted for war crimes his mea culpa will come in the form of “my bad, hehehe.”

The expression has layers of nuance, of course. The wiki-site, urbandictionary.com, which lets visitors identify, define, and vote on the most accurate definition of slang terms, offers this consensus definition of “my bad”:

A way of admitting a mistake, and apologizing for that mistake, without actually apologizing:

“I did something bad, and I recognize that I did something bad, but there is nothing that can be done for it now, and there is technically no reason to apologize for that error, so let’s just assume that I won’t do it again, get over it, and move on with our lives.”

Ruder than apologizing, but with the same meaning: a flippant apology.

The number two definition, which also garnered several “amens!”:

(n.) A combination of an apology and a dismissal. Basically, saying “oh yeah, I did that, but I don’t care”.

Persons of an older generation can find this quite annoying to hear when expecting an actual apology.

That definitely sums up how I felt about it, although I do not consider myself a “person of an older generation.” And the pathetic thing is that the schlub who said it was probably my age, too.

So there I am on my back in the middle of Dartmouth Street with this pudding standing there sucking on his iced coffee staring down at me. “Dude, my bad.” I just tore into him. I told him in the future he might want to look the other way–the way traffic is coming–before crossing the street. I mean, I don’t get it. Somebody could’ve been seriously injured here.

He sneers at me, mumbles, “dick,” and schlubs off across the street, leaving me battered, bruised, broken, and in disbelief.

Not really. I was lucky there’s a little hill there, and I was going uphill at the time. If I’d been on the other side, heading downhill, I probably would’ve broken my neck. So I was bruised all up and down my left side, and a little sore afterwards, but not too much worse for wear. And I wasn’t really in disbelief, either, I just like alliteration. The whole thing was all too believable, unfortunately. You’d actually expect it in Boston.

Which is why we need Rudy Giuliani. And not just for the jaywalking, either. Drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians all need to seriously shape up. Streets should be color-coded. Cyclists should have dedicated lanes, as should buses and cars. Traffic signals in areas with heavy pedestrian traffic should be modified, with shorter waits for pedestrians, who should be allowed to cross intersections diagonally (which means red lights in all directions for auto and bike traffic when pedestrians have the “go”). Cars, bikes and pedestrians who violate traffic rules should be aggressively pursued, and excessively fined. This will wound Bostonians’ rampant sense of individual exceptionalism and entitlement, but in the end it will make our streets much more livable.

(Speaking of livable streets, there’s a Street Social this afternoon in Cambridge starting at 5:30 sponsored by Livable Streets–click HERE for details.)

There’s room for debate, but I think part of the problem is the suburbanization of the city. And I mean attitudewise. Because a city is not just a place, it’s a distinct state of mind. A set of attitudes and values often at odds with those of the suburbs.

One thing every city has is a double-life. You either get that–and celebrate it in your own life in the city–or you should really just move out to the ‘burbs where you don’t need manners or social skills to get around, just an SUV and a credit card.

For those who would like to set up shop in the city, you should understand the unique spirit of cities. The secret life of cities, if you will. We all know that cities are inconvenient to get around, that they’re full of menacing crowds, multiple barriers on our way from point A to point B. But to those with eyes to see it, these barriers are passages to the secret city.

Not a hidden city, mind you. This second life of the city is an open-secret. And it opens up when you do. And when you grasp that everything and everyone is significant. And that you must strive always to be where you are. Be here, now.

When I enter a subway car I always think, “what if something happens here? What if my last moment on earth is here, in this subway car, with these people?” Because the last moment is The Moment. When the present is finally undeniably present and accounted for. When I walk onto a subway car, it’s like: I am here, now. Funky as it is. Everything that happens her and now is significant. There is no throw-away moment, no throw-away encounter with a fellow traveler, even that one there, groping his way along in the dark from one coolata to the next. My encounter with one of them yesterday could have been the death of me, after all. Careless, disconnected, coolata-fueled. It’s a deadly combination.

This secret life is made up of all the little interactions we have with one another, however careless and seemingly casual. They all play a role in our fate. They’re all significant, without exception. That sounds ominous and scary, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s about connectivity, after all. We are a part of each other’s stories. At the time of their telling. It’s a conversation to which we have to bring a respect of the other, and a genuine curiosity about the nature of this extraordinary organism of which, however different we may be from one another, we are each a vital part.

Not to sound too evolved, but I rarely see hints of awareness of this whole here, though I’m always on the look-out. Seems today we Bostonians are more likely to think of ourselves as impermeable, autonomous units, never mingling our auras gracefully, generously, like fellow travelers, but banging and bashing into each other like bumper cars, on our way to nowhere. We’re “in” our ‘Pods, with our urban armor to protect us. This may be a function of fear: the fear of potential violence so often associated with race, or the fear of affrontery so often seen in highly class-conscious cultures.

When your city is little more than a glorified bumper car course, you’re going to get banged up occasionally. I understand that. If that’s how it is, that’s how it is. But when you bash into me, please, please, whatever you do, just don’t say “oops, my bad,” or I will be forced to bash back.

This just in from Lee Matsueda over at TRU:

At last month’s TRU Rox/Dot Committee meeting the group decided it was ready for an initial action. This is not the only way to recruit other riders, win service improvements, and stop the fare increase, but it is a start. To be honest the meetings are boring but we’re planning on having some fun and making our presence known during the public comment period at the beginning of the meeting. The details will be decided upon at the TRU Rox/Dot Committee meeting on Monday, July 10th.

There are 9 MBTA board members including the Secretary of Transportation for the State of MA and MBTA Board Chair, John Cogliano. Please consider if you can make this meeting (it is at a weird time of the day – 1pm) and if you are willing to “kindly” address individual MBTA board members during the public comment period.

REMEMBER to bring a PICTURE ID (we need it to go into the meeting)

Thanks,

Lee H. Matsueda
Community Organizer
Alternatives for Community & Environnment (ACE)
2181 Washington, Suite 301
Roxbury, MA 02119

You can contact Lee at lee@ace-ej.org — Mike.

I have just heard Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Replica,” and it is better than sex, and at least as confusing. Ryuichi is a god.

I need a cigarette.

In the New York Times, HERE [$]. Some comments HERE.