Month: August 2009

At 7:30 a.m. this morning, I walked out of my door and into the stifling heat of the day. Unfortunately for a sweat prone guy like me, the heat was intensified by a permeating humidity that had me drenched after about 100 feet into my mile-long walk to the train. I was granted a brief respite from the heat on my forty minute train ride before being delivered at New Jersey’s always noxious Secaucus station. After inhaling flaming hot air seemingly tinged with animal corpse decay for all its disgusting odor, another brief recess was allowed on the train to New York’s Penn Station.

Arriving at Penn, commuters are released from the train underground in a unbearable sauna where the day’s heat, trains expelling sweltering exhaust and hundreds of commuters piling up like a traffic jam in front of tiny, one lane stairways make this the most disgusting and frustrating two minutes of the entire hour-long commute. With my shirt now soaking wet again as I pull a bandana from my pocket to wipe sweat from my forehead, I’m hit with the pernicious smell of popcorn. Normally a smell I enjoy, I can never savor this scent because in Penn it is more a reek brought on by food court and commuter B.O. mingling below street level. I don’t think they even sell popcorn there.

Finally, after trudging up two flights of stairs and expelling yet more sweat from my lava-hot pores, I step out into the open air of Manhattan. The mass of determined nine-to-fivers, mindlessly slow-walking tourists and shouting newspaper vendors—combined with the 90 degree heat and high humidity index—assure that even my emergence from the inferno of Penn is no relief.

A half block away from the station’s exit, now with the sun’s rays beating down on me in their full intensity, I stop as a bus turns the corner. All of a sudden a wave of complete ridiculousness washes over me and even the sizzling discomfort I’m standing in, and have been standing in for a full hour, is washed away by the best bus advertisement I have ever seen…
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