• The train crawls along the elevated and down in one of the streets running along-side and under it I can see a crowd around an SUV stopped with the motor running. One man is being dragged from the car, flailing at his assailant. I crane my neck as we pass, I even get up and move down the car to follow the receding action. I miss action between windows, but I can fill in what I miss, calculate how a punch was launched by seeing how it landed. Most people on the train put on airs of disgust at my interest, but they crane to get an extra look at the violence too.
• Sometimes you’re watching an action flick or some disaster movie and you watch all the characters who weren’t fast enough, who don’t dodge the falling debris, who don’t make it across the crevasse before the bridge collapses. Sometimes you might think “Oh c’mon. I would have been fast enough. How can these people misjudge that timing.” Ride the subway for a couple stops, watch all the people who misjudge the gap and stumble or get caught in the closing doors.
• Nearly every day I pass under and then over the East River. Taking the view from outside time, seeing all of it at once, solidifying my “self” as a smear of energy across the landscape and overscape and underscape of the city, it is two rivers of me above and below the surface that the East River threads through.

Photo “Smoke” by Several Seconds on Flickr.