Lately I've been thinking a lot about the subways. I've been working on two separate projects (a film and a comic) about the subway at the same time, randomly. So I thought I'd share the events of last Friday night.

I went to this beer garden in Astoria. Like an idiot, I forgot to bring my ID. Sidebar in my defense: I haven't really had problems getting into bars without being ID'ed since I was 17. That's why I have a beard; it's naturally-occurring ID. Anyway, what else was I to do but go home and get my passport. I thought I would just hop on the train and it would take 45 minutes each way, joining my friends just as they were really shitfaced.

I walked toward the train station, and as I rounded the corner onto 31st Street, a man of indeterminate ethnicity and a thick Queens accent walked up beside me. As the stop light turned red, a woman in an SUV decided to brake in the middle of the walkway.

"Fuck! Fuck you and your fucking friends. You fucking white people!" said the man to a group of people behind him. Then he turned to the SUV driver and said, "what the fuck is this? Why are you here <i>[in the middle of the street]</i>? You white people think you can do anything you want!"

We continued walking towards the train station. He and I were the only people on the block for thirty paces. "Fucking white people! I hate white people. They think they can do what ever the fuck they want," he shouted to anyone within earshot. "That's why the World Trade Center's not fucking there any more."

I was walking six or seven steps behind him. I didn't feel like pointing out that white people had built the World Trade Center in the first place.

The man turned to me, while both of us continued to walk. He had seen me when we were crossing the street; maybe he was checking to see if I was still following him.

"I wish you would fucking say something, cause I'd like to punch you in your fucking mouth."

He was look at me when he said this, so I had to react. I raised my eyebrows and looked about thirty degrees to his left; that is, ahead, towards the train station. We continued walking the whole time, mind you.

I didn't feel like explaining to him that I don't think Jews are really white (I go by the strictest whiteness standards, i.e., white supremacists'), or that I'm a fan of RaceTraitor magazine's notion that "whiteness is a construct." Most importantly, I did not wish to get punched in my fucking mouth in the name of white people.

We kept walking, and he kept talking about how he fucking hated fucking white people. When we got to the train station, he veered off towards the adjacent bus stop instead. As I walked up the stairs to the el, I heard him making new friends with the people waiting for the bus.

The rest of my trip home was eventful save that it did, amazingly, only take 45 minutes, as I had predicted. No sweat, I run up to my apartment, get my bag and ID, and head over to Borough Hall again.

By the time I get on the N train, I'm already 20 minutes late on account of a police investigation at Union Square. I sat down down in front of a middle-aged woman wearing headphones.

Within about a minute, the woman wails, "holy holy holy, holy holy holy" in what I would have to assume was in time, but certainly not in key with the Christian inspirational music blaring on her headphones. I was trying to read a book. Clearly, this was not going to work.

She continued singing about Jesus, but every so often she would stop or just hum along for a minute or so. The whole time she sat there, her eyes opened and closed randomly, sometimes staring at certain people or advertisements, sometimes closed as their owner did an unwitting Stevie Wonder impression.

"Lift him up! Praise and lift him up!" warbled the woman. Look, lady, I thought, he's Jesus, I'm betting he doesn't need you to lift him up any higher.

Everyone around me is embarrassed and/or annoyed and/or amused at the singing woman. I wonder if the people sitting behind me are using her off-key song snippets to distract them from the smell of the homeless man sprawled out asleep behind and to the right of me. I tried it for a while, but it didn't work.

Now, what I do in situations like this is try and establish eye contact with the noisome woman (I figured she wasn't going to punuch me in the name of Jesus). I accomplished this by staring directly at her for one minute, while she was singing. She continued to sing, even as she broke eye contact. This plan was getting me nowhere.

I contemplated tapping her on the shoulder and saying, "pardon me, miss, I don't mean to sound rude, but could you do me the tremendous favor of shutting the fuck up? Thank you so much," or maybe something cute like "excuse me, ma'am, but do you think Jesus would sing off-key?"

I was just about to reach for the woman when a teenage sporting a Hell's Kitchen Motorcycle Club T-shirt started vomiting. I couldn't tell what was going on at first, only that there was a collective "uuuuugh!" and people moving towards the part of the car with the homeless man sleeping (ha, ha, suckers!). The boy continued to vomit, not a lot, but definitely providing the requisite noise to make everyone's stomach churn. The Christian woman stopped singing, got up and asked the boy if he was alright. Now I have two thoughts, namely a) what do you think, Jesus freak, and b) if I had known that was the onyl way to get you to stop singing, I would have thrown up five stops ago.

Struck with the totality of the situation, I started laughing, but because I had been holding my breath so as to avoid smelling the various stenches, it came out like a villainous cackle (free acting tip: no exhale when laughing = evil). By the time I got to the bar, almost everyone had just left.