Guarding of the Change
The new bus fares kicked in last week and now I have numbers that aren’t zero to the right of the decimal point when my Metrocard scans.
It annoys me. You have no idea how much it annoys me.
For years we had the symmetry of a two buck subway fare and a five buck express bus fare which made it easy to run your card right to zero when it started getting worn down. I’m not one of those people who buys a new card every time the old card runs out of money; I think if more people reused their cards the TA might save a few dollars and not raise the fare as frequently. Or I’m just naïve. Or I’m just bugged by the piles of cards people leave scattered on the floor by the vending machines and the turnstiles and on the edifices-formerly-known-as-token booths that are now “information centers”. In any event, the change to having change on the card bugs me.
Sometimes you don’t know what you had until you have something else.
The other day I heard the bass line of my cuckoo clock's hourly chime for the first time. Funny how something can occupy a room with you for years and you can still discover something completely new about it. The funnier thing is I can’t figure out if I really heard it or if I composed it in my head. I’ve seen the inside of the clock and there aren’t any bass strings or anything that gets plucked for that matter. Can the music box workings make bass noises? If not, maybe I did really do an in-my-head remix. What’s the difference anyway?
Something happened and I don’t know what it is, do I?
I was riding the train home from the ferry the other day, the 2nd of July. The train passed the Stapleton docks and saw the Macy’s barges docked, laying in wait, waiting to explode in the harbor on the Fourth, which we capitalize because it is a sacred day. Wikipedia says sacred “is in general the state of being holy (perceived by religious individuals as associated with the divine”. Then it says “Divinity and divine (sometimes 'the Divinity' or 'the Divine') are broadly applied but loosely defined terms, used variously within different faiths and belief systems — and even by different individuals within a given faith — to refer to some transcendent or transcendental power, or its attributes or manifestations in the world.” So I’ll buy the Fourth as a sacred day. Jean Shepherd used to say “Wear the right costume and the part plays itself”. He attributed that to George Ade who is less remembered than he probably should be. Hell, I only ever heard of him through Shep’s monologues.
The barges stood there (or more accurately floated there) right next to good old Staten Island (or more accurately next to some piers that are attached to the shore of good old Staten Island) with “Macy’s” stenciled in white on an ominous black background. I rolled by them with a holiday weekend in front of me and thought “the anticipation of a thing is often better than the thing itself”. Then I thought, “ooh write that down you deep, deep man” and then I thought maybe not or maybe I didn’t have a pen or that I was merely restating a cliché (which I was) or maybe the whole exercise was futile. So I didn’t bother writing it down, or if I did I haven’t looked at it so it doesn’t matter. I do remember that I stared as the barges (remember them?) slowly moved from right to left in my field of vision as the train rattled on and carried me to a holiday, holy day weekend.
The barges fired off their cargo on schedule I’m told, though I never saw it. Lots of people went “ooh” and “aah” and had a time that just couldn’t be beat though. At least that’s what the post-display traffic reports told me.
A few days later my Metrocard slid in and out of a fare box. The display said “26.75 remaining”. At $5.50 a ride that’s 4.8636363636(etc) rides left. I wonder where the 0.86363636363636(etc) takes me.
It annoys me. You have no idea how much it annoys me.
For years we had the symmetry of a two buck subway fare and a five buck express bus fare which made it easy to run your card right to zero when it started getting worn down. I’m not one of those people who buys a new card every time the old card runs out of money; I think if more people reused their cards the TA might save a few dollars and not raise the fare as frequently. Or I’m just naïve. Or I’m just bugged by the piles of cards people leave scattered on the floor by the vending machines and the turnstiles and on the edifices-formerly-known-as-token booths that are now “information centers”. In any event, the change to having change on the card bugs me.
Sometimes you don’t know what you had until you have something else.
The other day I heard the bass line of my cuckoo clock's hourly chime for the first time. Funny how something can occupy a room with you for years and you can still discover something completely new about it. The funnier thing is I can’t figure out if I really heard it or if I composed it in my head. I’ve seen the inside of the clock and there aren’t any bass strings or anything that gets plucked for that matter. Can the music box workings make bass noises? If not, maybe I did really do an in-my-head remix. What’s the difference anyway?
Something happened and I don’t know what it is, do I?
I was riding the train home from the ferry the other day, the 2nd of July. The train passed the Stapleton docks and saw the Macy’s barges docked, laying in wait, waiting to explode in the harbor on the Fourth, which we capitalize because it is a sacred day. Wikipedia says sacred “is in general the state of being holy (perceived by religious individuals as associated with the divine”. Then it says “Divinity and divine (sometimes 'the Divinity' or 'the Divine') are broadly applied but loosely defined terms, used variously within different faiths and belief systems — and even by different individuals within a given faith — to refer to some transcendent or transcendental power, or its attributes or manifestations in the world.” So I’ll buy the Fourth as a sacred day. Jean Shepherd used to say “Wear the right costume and the part plays itself”. He attributed that to George Ade who is less remembered than he probably should be. Hell, I only ever heard of him through Shep’s monologues.
The barges stood there (or more accurately floated there) right next to good old Staten Island (or more accurately next to some piers that are attached to the shore of good old Staten Island) with “Macy’s” stenciled in white on an ominous black background. I rolled by them with a holiday weekend in front of me and thought “the anticipation of a thing is often better than the thing itself”. Then I thought, “ooh write that down you deep, deep man” and then I thought maybe not or maybe I didn’t have a pen or that I was merely restating a cliché (which I was) or maybe the whole exercise was futile. So I didn’t bother writing it down, or if I did I haven’t looked at it so it doesn’t matter. I do remember that I stared as the barges (remember them?) slowly moved from right to left in my field of vision as the train rattled on and carried me to a holiday, holy day weekend.
The barges fired off their cargo on schedule I’m told, though I never saw it. Lots of people went “ooh” and “aah” and had a time that just couldn’t be beat though. At least that’s what the post-display traffic reports told me.
A few days later my Metrocard slid in and out of a fare box. The display said “26.75 remaining”. At $5.50 a ride that’s 4.8636363636(etc) rides left. I wonder where the 0.86363636363636(etc) takes me.
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