…from The Globe.

…and The Herald.

More fare increases on the way! Read all about it HERE.

I would say, “write the GM of the MBTA and your local and state reps,” but I’ve tried that before–even providing links to all of the above and suggestions for what to say, and I don’t think anybody did it. So this time all I’ve got to say is: “suck it up, suckas!”

Actually, just to be informnative and solution-oriented, as we here at T-Rage always, always try to be (how could you have failed to notice?), I will mention, for those of you too lazy or incurious or cool to click on the link above, that the week of May 15th there are a number of public meetings sponsored by the MBTA planned for all over Boston and the suburbs. You can find the schedule HERE, although I won’t hold my breath waiting for you all with T-Rage T-shirts at the door.

My monthly pass is set to go from $44 to $62, seems like, but I can probably bike six months out of the year, which’ll save me almost four hundred bucks. I mean, I find the very thought of forking out nearly $750 a year for what I’m already paying too much for at the current rate, with no improvements in service as part of the deal revolting. There are no words for how revoltingly revolting the idea of it is to me.

I recommend just buying a bike instead. It’s cheaper, healthier, and a hell of a lot faster than the T.

I love this new idea the GOP’s come up with to ease our “pain at the pump.” Hand out a hundred bucks to every motorist in exchange for finally getting their hands on the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. Nice.

I mean, who’s gonna turn down a hundred bucks? Free money, right? And in the end, who really cares about the wildlife? I mean, what have the Caribou done for you lately?

Still have yet to emerge from my wireless crisis, so I was back at Bates Hall yesterday when in came a most annoying woman in head scarf and sunglasses. She was either one of these Western women who choose the veil or an overstuffed unglamorous version of the late Audrey Hepburn. I am guessing the former was the case. And the fact that she was clearly a convert was annoying, because when people are born into a religion, it’s somewhat understandable that they would continue to practice it, but converts are always out to prove something. And, as my dear old dowager friend, whom I met and mooched off of years ago in Budapest, Madame von K– used to say: “stridency in anything is unattractive.” I have not found all of her maxims to be true, nor even many of them, but this one definitely is.

Anyway. So she was annoying right off the bat. And I want to make it clear that it has nothing to do with the scarf. I have nothing against scarves. I have a colleague who is an authentic Muslim from the Middle East, and she wears the loveliest scarves. And she is really the loveliest person. See, so some of my best friends wear headscarves.

But people have an aura as surely as they have an odor. And this woman’s was rancid. She was conspicuous in the first place, but made herself even more conspicuous by the way she behaved. Bates is clearly a reading room, which means most people are reading in it. It’s a quiet place. Well, she sits down—at the table across the center aisle from mine—and starts ripping single pages out of her daily planner. One by one. R-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-rip. R-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-rip. R-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-rip.

OK, whatever. Clueless, right? Unfortunately, it just happened that this was the day I left my headphones at home. Meanwhile she busied herself very self-importantly ripping out the pages of her planner, and then ripping them up.

By the way, there’s a custodian going through now. He just paused, looked around, and then threw a bottle into one of the little metal waste paper baskets here. It made a huge sound, reverberating through the hall, which seemed to satisfy him. He sauntered to the other end of the hall, repeated the gesture, and then sauntered out. And they say the working class male is inarticulate. Well, people get their point across, don’t they? One way or another.

So back with Jameela the Ripper. I got used to it. I’m very adaptable like that. Then, after about forty-five minutes, this nutty-looking wiry little woman with a mop of frizzy grey hair came scrambling in, and went right up to Jameela—I thought sure we were gonna have a Bates Hall bum fight—and asked her if she minded her sitting down right across from her! Right across from her! It’s unheard of! Especially when there were free seats that were not right across from her! But The Friz had a laptop, and the tables only have outlets on the inside aisle-side, not the outside wall-side. It’s just one of those things. I mean, it made some kind of sense, at least.

And the Friz was nice enough about it. I mean, she could’ve just sat there. There’s no rule that says you have to ask someone’s permission to sit RIGHT FREAKIN ACROSS FROM THEM in a library reading room, after all.

But, check this out: Jameela the Ripper didn’t even acknowledge her, but immediately—without a moment’s hesitation she started very violently, noisily gathering her things up. I was like, damn, girl. Chill. Ol’ Friz is not that bad. You’re lucky Mohamed’s not here. (But, come to think of it—I have never seen Jameela and Mohamed in the same place at the same time—could it be a sort of wacky “Krippendorf’s Tribe” type thing, where Jameela actually IS Mohamed? The mind boggles.)

So here Jameela is gathering up her stuff in a noisy huff, and Ol’ Friz starts waving her hands in Mohamed–er, Jameela’s face (she still has her big, mysterious Audrey Hepburn sunglasses on, by the way) and Ol’ Friz is shouting, “Hey! Hey! You in there? Miss? Miss?!?” But Jameela refuses to answer, or even to look at her. “Yo! Lady! Can I sit here? Do you mind?!? Hello! He-lo-o-o-o-o!” Ol’ Friz is still waving her hands in Jameela’s face, until finally Jameela’s got all her little scraps of ripped-up paper gathered up and stomps off to another table, like, three tables away.

So was it a real victory for Ol’ Friz, or just by default? QOTD. I’ll tally all votes and get back to you.

Anyway, I got a little chuckle out of the whole spectacle, at least. But Ol’ Friz got the last laugh. That’s the thing about crazy people. So she ended up watching some kind of video, without headphones, on her laptop. It was just louder than whisper volume, which was the perfect volume to bug the holy hell out of anyone in her immediate vicinity.

Another day in Da Hall. Gotta love it.

Sitting outside the library this morning a few minutes before it opened, and looking out over Copley Square, I counted twenty-five cars, trucks, and SUVs, backed up, waiting for the light on Boylston to change. Every single one of them had but one single occupant in it. I think it’s a shame that it takes $3-per-gallon gas prices for the government to come up with real incentives to use public transit.

Now, apparently, there’s been a move on the part of the legislature to give individuals who spend over a certain amount on public transit per year a significant tax rebate. And it’s about time. Even the President, trying to score some points for his party in an election year, is touting alternative energy (hydrogen is his new energy source of choice) and incentives for hybrids. Is this the same president who, a couple years ago, was offering huge write-offs for SUVs? Yes, I think it is.

Whatever. People need a good kick in the balls, that’s for sure. The legislature should raise the driving age, too, while they’re at it. No one has come up with a good reason not to. In fact, the only reason I’ve heard, from our privileged classes, of course, is that American idol wannabes wouldn’t be able to get to their auditions if the driving age was raised to seventeen-and-a-half. Well, boo hoo. I mean, the obvious reason for keeping the current driving age is that youngsters work, but the youngsters whining about it don’t, for the most part. They’re the ones driving flashy Beemers and Lexus SUVs to their all-important after-school Idol auditions. Outlaw American Idol, too. Problem solved.

I have some sympathy for working people, from dual-income families, where mom or dad can’t shuttle the kids around, but that’s not really my problem. My problem is that the rest of us have to pay, in countless ways, for their inability to budget their time. And why do we have to pay? Precisely because their inability to budget is based on higher consumption, and we give absolute preference in our society to those who can—and don’t hesitate—to consume more. We are a consumer culture to the core.

I’m not saying anything everybody doesn’t already know, of course. The question is, does it have to be this way? And if so, why? I took a little hike around Walden Pond a couple weeks ago, and they were selling t-shirts in the gift shop with Thoreau’s injunction to “simplify, simplify, simplify” on them. When you have to buy a t-shirt with this message on it in order to get it—well, it’s a little ironic, innit?

I remember a few years ago there was a big “simplify, simplify, simplify” movement on. But mainly it meant the switch from Laura Ashley window treatments to Ralph Lauren. You don’t simplify by cutting down on consumption, you simplify by changing brands, just like you lose weight not by eating less, but by eating more low-fat foods.

Bitch bitch bitch. I know, even I get sick of hearing myself bang on about it, but come on. When carpundit asked, in apparent earnest, why I didn’t just get my own wireless connection, I thought it was obvious. If you live in a triple-decker and somebody has a strong enough signal for everyone, why not split the cost three ways? Why isn’t that our first impulse, rather than throwing money at price-gouging telecom giants who had no compunctions for years about stealing our roll-over minutes? What’s wrong with this picture? In lots of little ways, it’s the war of all against all, isn’t it?

One things for sure, it’s harder than ever to simplify. My dad was one of these comical old coots who was always coming up with overcomplicated ways to simplify things. He really seemed to believe that at the end of all this was some sort of suburbatopia of perfectly climate-controlled, totally automated homes run by clapper technology, sitting on self-mowing, self-raking lawns, with self-shoveling drives, and so on. The best part of it was his cooking. He had perfected exactly three dinner entrees from his big Betty Crocker Cookbook since his retirement that he would make over and over and over again for my mother, night after night after night, year after year, in a never-changing three-day rotation. They were minor marvels, exact replicas in three dimensions of the picture in the cookbook he had taken them from. And that was obviously the point for him, although my mother confided that she liked the breakfast she prepared for herself while dad was still in bed better.

My point? I forget. Hmm.

I guess even when we simplify, particularly through systemization, we usually find that it’s not the magic bullet, after all. My dad seemed to desire a completely controlled environment, the same one that seemed, understandably, to stifle my mom. The goal was never simplification, but control of his environment. We see the same thing with technologies that are touted as means to simplify our lives, when more often than not they come to represent a false sense of security, or control, in a world gone crazy on account of the self-same technologies creating the proliferating problems they advertise solutions for.

Oof. I’m getting a little dizzy. Stop the world, I’m gonna throw up!

Anyway. I’m not about to move out to the wilderness. Too many mosquitoes. Simple is good. Mosquitoes, not so good. And don’t get me started on the black flies. I lived in Baxter State Park in Maine and worked on the Appalachian Trail for ten weeks one summer in my early twenties, and the mosquitoes and those demonic black flies made a meal of me every day and night—I probably lost two quarts of blood daily up there. Never again.

Hey, it’s Earth Day! Hooray for Earth! (Disclosure: I’m rooting for Earth to win.)

I’ve been wanting to ask those of you who cycle in Boston if you have ever noticed that no matter what direction you’re traveling, there’s always a headwind? QOTD.

A little shout-out to Charlie D., regarding livablestreets. I went to a forum at the Museum of Science recently that they co-sponsored. A lot of great ideas being implemented elsewhere, definitely worth looking into for Boston.

I should say that when I lived in JP I enjoyed having the greenway right outside my door. JP is fairly bicycle-friendly, but still, I think, focused more on “leisure-cycling,” not actually getting from A to B in a timely fashion. It’s a start, but Boston is the perfect size for a comprehensive network of bike trails that could get you anywhere you wanted to go. We should aim higher.

Anyway, thanks Charlie D., and I encourage everyone to check out livablestreets.com!

And a shout-out to dsaklad, too, who wrote to ask: “How would you compare Bates Hall with other reading room areas around the Boston Public Library buildings’ floors?…” I’m assuming this is a rhetorical question, dsaklad, and if so, it’s a very, very good point.

I don’t really have any major complaints with Da Hall. Even the crazies are well-behaved there, mostly on account of the proactive security personnel, who don’t take no guff. But the truth is you don’t have to be crazy to act the fool in public. In fact, I’m sitting right now in that little cafe-type place in the McKim Building–Sebastian’s–and there’s a perfectly normal-looking fellow in the corner reading something very lengthy on his laptop aloud to himself. Now, in and of itself, there’s nothing wrong with that. I always read what I’ve written out loud before I send it off for publication, for example, because, for some reason, I think it should sound nice. But I wouldn’t do it in the reading room, or in the middle of a cafe, unless I had been asked to a reading, or something, y’know? It’s a matter of sharing public space. It’s about mutual consent as to its uses.

When the students are in their exam period, the library and this little cafe are just crawling with people who seem to be on a mission to outfreak each other. I’ve seen some stunningly pretentious performances, let me tell you. Young people trying to shock with their put-on personae. Sad, really.

It’s like Berklee School of Mucus over on Mass Ave. I pass through the area on my way to the Fens, and all I’ve got to say is they’re all so different they’re the same. Looking freaky is easy enough these days. Doesn’t impress me. It’s an extension of adolescent acting-out. Nothing more, nothing less.

(Meeeeowww! You can tell I’m getting old and crotchety–in fact, yesterday I went shopping and was in the fitting room trying on shirts. I came out to ask the twenty-something clerk if she thought the fitted shirt I had on fit, and she said, “well…” It was snug, but that’s how it’s cut. She was like, “that’s the style, but…” I was like, “but what?” She didn’t want to say it, bless her, but the “but” was something like “but for people half your age.” I bought it anyway.)

What you’ve got in the youth of today is a kind of moral oreo: deeply conservative on the inside, but freaky on the outside. They’re joiners—but so were the hippies and the beats and so on. It’s always been about belonging. To a tribe, sure, but having your face stapled is no different really than wearing a suit everyday. A different team, sure, but essentially the same game.

I remember when Vans were really cutting-edge cool. That’s when the skateboarding subculture was going mainstream in the most obnoxious way. About six months later, everybody was wearing ‘em. I mean, old bag-ladies and bums were tricked out with their double-tongues. Vans are very comfortable. I admit I bought a pair and wore ‘em out, though I have never in my life been on a skateboard.

Point is: you’ve got to put a lot into staying ahead of the curve these days. That’s why tattoos and piercings have gained popularity. Because you have to really want to be part of the tribe to get ‘em.

But it’s all good. When you think about it, how much true originality can one society take?

Anyway, everyone knows the real freaks are the ones everybody says “seemed perfectly normal” before they bit off the heads of ninety-seven live chicks and left them lined up on little toothpick stakes on the State House lawn, or whatever. And no, that wasn’t me.

But back to Bates Hall. The great thing about this brave new world we live in is that, actual schizophrenics are really the least annoying of the lot. It’s a great time to be stark-raving mad, if ever there was one. Because nowadays, it’s those who are mad who often seem most sane.

And “sane” people are always taking advantage of the license we grant the insane in public. It’s like, “well, if crazy people can talk to themselves in public, why can’t I?” Or, you know, “if nutso there on the internet can kidnap his neighbor and cannibalize her, why shouldn’t I be able to, too?”

Manners are memes. It’s all monkey-see-monkey-do. What’s conventional is arrived at by a sort of silent consensus. It’s not what someone says should be done, like the Catholic Church or the Bush Administration would like it to be, it’s what people are actually doing, and when enough people get to talking to themsleves in public or eating their neighbors’ children, then you’ve got what they call a critical mass. Manners don’t always make the best sense. But I do think morals are intuitively obvious to anyone with a little good sense. (Under no circumstances do I condone cannibalism, by the way, in case you were wondering.)

And the monkey-see-monkey-do factor is why it’s even more important to proactively—preemptively—spread positive memes. On Earth Day, and every day!

I’ve gotta tell you, I’m sick of hearing people whine about gas prices, when all I see on my bike commute to Back Bay from Dot is big-ass SUVs with one person in ‘em, backed up for miles along Mass Ave.

The thing that’s vexed me for years is the trend, after 9/11, to buy huge, gas-guzzlin SUVs, in absolute defiance of common sense. News Flash, bitches: driving a gas-guzzler is no one’s God-given right.

Having said that, I can’t see cycling really catching on as a widespread alternative to driving in the States. Even a compact city, like Boston, where every effort should be made to make cycling everywhere more viable, is doing next to nothing to encourage alternative transportation.

There is an infrastructure issue here, but there is a larger impediment to alternative transport, and it is purely psychological. We have built our environment around the car, and now we have a culture that can’t conceive of life without it.

It still cracks me up that people are genuinely puzzled about skyrocketing obesity rates. People are on the move, sure, but they, themselves, are hardly moving. You go to a shopping center and watch people circle around for half an hour so they can get a prime parking spot ten feet from the shop. Heaven forbid they have to walk twenty. I’ll say it again: We are a sad, fat nation in denial.

I can’t say I’d want too many more cyclists on the street, though, the streets here being what they are. It would be even harder to get around than it already is. And cyclists–myself included–are not too keen on following the rules of the road, which makes it difficult to predict what they’re going to do when you encounter them. I will say this: I understand now that I have been cycling in the city for a couple weeks why cyclists act like they do. You wouldn’t get anywhere in Boston if you obeyed the rules. You have to be an aggressive rider to get anywhere.

Back at Bates today.

Mohamed, my friend in the army jacket is back, too, of course. Mohamed is his Muslim prison name, as it turns out. His real name is Jimmy. Master Bates just showed up and is arranging and rearranging his wads of newspaper. Feels like home.

Usually people leave Mohamed alone. His barricade is a formidable barrier, signaling his desire for isolation. The tables in Bates Hall are able to accommodate eight, but, as in any public space, people find ways to spread out and mark their borders. I do it, too. Like most people I take up two spots—one for my junk (no, not that junk, silly—get your mind out of the gutter!) and one for my self. I would move my junk if it got crowded, but if it’s not crowded and someone were to—somewhat inconceivably—ask me to move it, I would probably “mean mug” them, and hope that I was better armed than they were (I have my bicycle seat, which I suppose could be used as a weapon in a pinch).

Americans, even the skinny ones, seem to have the sense to sit at least a seat apart, whenever space permits. It’s because of our super-size auras, I guess.

Anyway, yesterday, some middle-aged guy had the gall to sit at the other end of the table where Mohamed was sitting. And Mohamed expressed his displeasure by taking one of the super-size books he’s barricaded himself in with and slamming it down on the table. The thud thus produced was of Biblical proportions, echoing through the cavernous hall, causing everyone to look up, and the poor guy at Mohamed’s table to look around nervously.

No one was sure if Mohamed had been provoked by the man’s innocent incursion, or was just being schizoid, as usual. We all went back to work. The man got up, leaving his jacket on his chair, and went off to look for a reference book. When he came back, there was no doubt about Mohamed’s displeasure. He banged the book on the tabletop again, without looking up, but this time the irritation was visible on his furrowed brow. And he shifted suddenly, so that he was turned resolutely away from the interloper.

But, lest you think Mohamed is the exception, I have a story, again from my personal diary, from December of 2004. I was at the library because my roommate was having a little afternoon “play date” back at the apartment. (You’re going to start thinking I’m Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man if I keep quoting my diary, if you don’t already.)

3:29. I’m in the reading room at the Boston Public Library. It’s absolutely packed—students from the area colleges. It was hard to find a spot, and when I did and started to take my coat off this blonde sitting catty-corner says to me, “oh, my friend’s coming back any minute.”

The seat across from hers was free and two seats beside it, and two seats beside her.

I nodded and smiled. I said, “great,” and made to sit down in the farthest seat from her that was free.

She said, “well, he’s got a lot of stuff—he kinda likes to spread out.”

I’m like, “great, thanks for the head’s-up,” and sat down.

She huffed and rolled her eyes at me.

A quarter of an hour later, and her little friend still hasn’t shown up. I want to tell her I freakin own this reading room. I was reading in this reading room when she was in her training bra. The nerve.

4:22. Every once in a while Heather looks over at me, thinking I’m looking over at her when I’m looking at my notes. Almost an hour has passed, and still no sign of her imaginary friend. She apparently feels she is entitled to six spaces. There are eight per table. She has no books open, or papers spread about—she’s typing away on her laptop—but she has thrown her handbag over to the side, in front of the seat next to hers, and has tossed a couple of decoy notebooks out in front of the seat across from her (and sort of spilling over to the seat next to it) to make it look to the casual observer that they are taken. But it doesn’t take freakin Nancy Drew to see that the bottoms of the notebooks are facing her, rather than the seat across from her, as would likely be the case if they belonged to someone sitting there.

The thing that gets me is that I didn’t try to sit across from her, or beside her, but across from her, three seats down from her, when she tried to dissuade me. It’s like on the T—people generally don’t sit right next to one another, rump to rump. If I have the choice of sitting right between two people or standing, usually I stand. I understand people sort of claiming the space on either side of them, when space allows, but you can’t claim two spaces or three spaces either side of you when it’s packed in like this, and why on earth would you need to? I mean, if you want that kind of space, rent a freakin room.

Opa! she just flipped her long, curly locks, in a rather dramatic gesture—maybe that’s what she needs all that space for.

5:19. Nearly two hours. Gathering up my stuff.

Before I go I ask her, “where’d your friend run off to? Maybe he’s in danger. You should go after him!”

She just snarls in reply.

“Grrr!” I growl back.

But how pathetic is that? When you get stood up by even your imaginary friends?

So, everybody does it, some are just more artful about it than others. I can actually relate to Mohamed better than Heather. This is probably the one place he can hang out and do his thing and not have to worry about people really hassling him. But Heather? That’s just your garden-variety entitlement mentality taken to its logical extreme. Although, she wouldn’t have been here at all if there hadn’t been plenty of other people around to snarl at and deny seatage to. Because what are eight seats to yourself worth when there’s a whole roomful or carful of ‘em? Know what I’m sayin?

How about “Bates-Rage”?

Bates Hall is getting on my nerves in a major way.

I don’t know what’s up this morning, but about twenty-five people have come into Bates Hall since I got here to take pictures. And they’re all using their FLASH! WHICH IS PROHIBITED, PEOPLE! YEAH, THAT MEANS YOU, LADY! The last couple days I’ve been reporting to you from the BPL, there’s not been one instance of flash photography in Da Hall (as we Bates Hall denizens call it). Why now? What phase is the moon in? Are we having increased sunspot activity?

Some guy just came in and tried to move one of the lamps on the tables here. People are funny.

Good ol’ Bates Hall. I’ve been coming here periodically to read, write, and study for years, of course. For nearly fifteen years, in fact—ever since I first came to Boston in the early nineties. And I’m telling you, it’s the same borderline personalities in here now that were in here when I started. Myself included. It’s like home. I call it “My Ancestral Home,” in fact. These are my peeps.

All week there’s been a brother in an army jacket buttoned up to his chin at the next table, who’s barricaded himself in behind a wall of big, fat reference books. He’s working hard on something. Blowing his nose, mainly. When he’s not doing that he’s squinting and staring into the middle distance. Sometimes he strokes his chin and shakes his head slowly. Occasionally he snaps his fingers, beatniklike. He’s extremely well-kempt—so extremely well-kempt you know there’s something amiss. But I like him. He gives the place the air of a prison library. I think one of the books in his book barricade is the Koran, actually.

And three tables away is my old friend, a resident of Da Hall. Master Bates, I call him. I wrote about him in an entry from my personal diary, way back in November, 2003:

There’s old Master Bates sitting at the next table, organizing his notes again. His morning ritual. He left, after choosing the day’s ball cap, for his Mexican shower downstairs.

There’s another regular who’s been busy today arranging and rearranging his things, and being very fastidious, wiping the tabletop with a kleenex from his pocket. Here comes Master Bates again, and it turns out they know each other! A pleasant surprise!

Master Bates begins rooting through his rucksack, throwing away some carefully selected balls of wadded-up newspaper. He has just fetched a Hebrew-English Lexicon of the Old Testament. OCDers, Schizophrenics, and Borderliners love the OT God. And the OT God loves them back. Heck, back in the day, He was one of ‘em.

Master Bates has stacks of notes in teeny, tiny print that he is also arranging meticulously. He is writing a book, it looks like: Meditations on La Via Crucis is the title. That’s Latin for the “Stations of the Cross.” It’s all painstakingly hand-written, of course. Not that I’m knocking any of it. Were this a Medieval monastery, all of this would be perfectly normal. Maybe Master Bates is actually Brother Bates, or Father Bates, or Archbishop Bates, who got sucked through a wormhole from the 14th Century. Like, pre-Gutenberg.

Opa! He has just dumped out a whole bag of magic markers on the table! Now he’s digging, digging, digging, carefully arranging his pullovers—six or seven of them—which he has stacked in the chair next to his. Rooting, rooting—digging for some treasure! A gem of enlightenment along La Via Lucis, perhaps. A pearl of wisdom at the bottom of his rucksack?

Aha! There it is!

He has chosen a new cap.

I suppose I was being a bit flippant when I wrote that. Today I see it differently, of course. There must be a place at Bates Hall for all of us. And who’s to say that his contribution is any less significant in his dimension than any of our is in ours? Not I.

But I do hope to get my wireless situation resolved sometime in the very near future, so I can start working from home again.

Now I’m off to the garden! Check out my new snapshots here.

“Boston officers shoot at suspect who fled stop in stolen SUV” and “MBTA officer, suspect exchange gunfire at T stop”.

Now, there have been times I have been tempted to stand up and fight for the rights of decent, well-behaved commuters, and say something to some young punks who are acting up on the platform. But you know that part of what’s going on in any such situation is a kind of dare–it’s a potent if primitive combination of intentional provocation and intimidation, and the fact is, a lot of these thugs are spoiling for a fight. And if they’re looking for it, they’re likely armed as well.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned the time last summer I was on the Orange line and a big gang of thugs busted onto the train, staring people down, and I ended up standing next to one, who muttered to his buddy, “I just wish someone would bump into me—I just want to beat the shit out of somebody.” I quietly made my way to the opposite end of the car.

You can bet not a one of them paid their fare, either. That’s just one of the many perks of membership in a band of marauding thugs.

Of course, there’s nothing you can do about this sort of thing, except move quietly to the opposite end of the car if you can. You do the math in your head when they storm in. You’ve got ten minutes to your stop. You can endure it. And why give them what they’re looking for? They travel in packs—or sometimes “swarms” as they’re calling it in the news now. I mean, did you see the security camera footage of the guard getting “swarmed” by a gang of young thugs on the news yesterday? If you stand up to them, who’ll back you up? Nobody, is who. Nobody wants trouble, except the troublemakers themselves. But who wants to sit there in silence and be intimidated like that?

I would say that the problem is probably not as bad as the press makes it out to be, but the numbers don’t lie. In every category, Boston crime rates are worse than the national average. Everybody knows the murder rate was up 34% in 2005. Aggravated assault, which is something much more likely to happen to just anybody in the wrong place at the wrong time, is off the hook.

Here’s an interesting article from the New York Times about the “bewildering” nature of the new surge in violent crime. I know I have banged on a good deal about eye-contact, but you’ve got to be careful these days: “mean mugging,” which, according to the article is ghetto slang for giving someone a dirty look, could get you killed.

When I was visiting my Aunt Mindy from Indy on St. Armand’s Island a couple of months ago, she told me to write an op-ed piece about conscripting petty criminals. I was like, uh, OK. You know, it goes against some of my gut convictions, but I do think a compulsory national service corps could help with the problem of youth violence, which often results, I think (perhaps simplistically), from lack of purpose, direction, connectivity with a positive community and cause, and plain old garden-variety boredom. Plus lack of prospects and hope of a better life, particularly relative to what we see on TV or in the movies, which also seems to some with violent tendencies to justify violence towards others unlike themselves.

I’m not pinning this on minorities, either. Take this thing at Duke. Whatever happened between that stripper and those Lacrosse players, one thing is for sure: it was sordid. Neither party is coming out of it squeaky clean. I heard yesterday one of the guys, who’s gone to the best, most expensive prep schools, and whom everyone says is a great student and team player, was arrested last year on a trip to Georgetown for assualting a man after taunting him with homophobic slurs. Then there’s the email from one team member, sent the day after rape accusations were made public, “announcing that the following night he planned ‘to have some strippers over’ and would be ‘killing the bitches’ as soon as they walked into his dorm room….The e-mail…notes that, after the strippers were killed, they would be skinned while the author was ‘cumming in my duke issue spandex.’” None of which proves that the young woman who claimed to have been raped was. But it would not surprise me. I certainly don’t doubt for a minute that the players taunted her with racial and misogynist slurs, though.

The picture that arises of the Duke Lacrosse team ain’t pretty, no matter how you slice it. It reminds me of the culture of “careless people” of privilege F. Scott Fitzgerald documented in Gatzby. Sometimes we forget: privilege leads to forms of violence just as surely as privation. It’s not poverty that’s to blame in our time.

Anyway, I think a real, functioning national service corps without the missionary overtones of the Peace Corps and Americorps, could do wonders. Nowadays the volunteer service corps, unfortunately, tends to draw people of privilege who sometimes go into it for the wrong reasons–to bolster their resumes, for example. And working abroad for many years, I ran into my share of Peace Corps volunteers whose attitudes towards their host cultures was downright insulting. As for Americorps or City Year, or whoever they are, whenever I see those kids on the T with their bright red jackets I feel like, what the hell? I think they should ditch the jackets, personally. Doesn’t it make you feel like “the natives” with these brave souls in their bright red jackets risking life and limb to “civilize” us, or something? We know you’re from the suburbs, but, please, try to blend.

I’m from the school of, if you’re going to do good in the world, skip the bright red jacket or the hairshirt, drop the megaphone, and just do it.

I could see the usefulness of uniforms with a conscripted army, of course. And I’m all for it. And if you made the uniforms cool enough–have Piggy-D, or Po-Diddly, or whatever the fuck his name is, design ‘em–a little beret for the lads, a sash for the ladies–you’d have a movement on your hands. The trick is to give them something real to do, not to exacerbate the problem by piling boredom on boredom. The danger is that pinheads like the pols in Washington, would get ideas about using conscripts to clean their houses, cook their meals, and chauffeur them around. Gotta make sure the rich don’t abuse it.

At any rate, I have a feeling it’s going to be a long, hot summer, and probably a senselessly violent one, too, unfortunately. What to do?

I said yesterday I liked to check the statues of Art and Science outside the McKim Building to see which one has gone to the birds. While I was waiting on the steps with Boston’s homeless literati for the library to open I had occasion to study the two Goddesses more closely. I have to admit that over the years I have taken them both for granted, but ever since they got a new coat of paint—what was it, a year ago or so?—they look so young and fresh they seemed to merit another look.

And talk about looks. The photo here hardly does them justice. You really have to see them for yourself, to verify what I’m about to reveal here: Art is clearly, clearly jealous of Science’s ball. Check it out for yourself. Science isn’t paying the least little bit of attention to Art, but Art is craning her neck to get a gander of what Science is up to. Science has this sort of haughty look on her face. Because she knows Art would like to snatch that ball from her. And Art looks pensive. Maybe aside from coveting Science’s ball, she’s afraid Science is gonna up and nail her with it, and Art’s got both hands full. She’d have a rough time dodging it.

And that’s another thing about Art. She’s trying to look all cool and casual but she’s clearly worried. Maybe she’s just anxiety-prone in general. She’s off her Prozac again. But she’s so forgetful! She’s brought her paint brush and her pallet, but where’s her easel? Where’s her canvas? Art has all this equipment to lug around, but all Science needs is her ball.

If only they could cooperate. Maybe Art should offer to paint Science’s ball! Do you think Science would go for it? Well, it’s worth a try.