GNR fans will appreciate this story. I was coming home from one of those miserable days at work, when a cloud follows you from the office, to the stairwell, to the revolving door of your work building, creeps down the subway stairs like a horror-movie mist and stands beside you in the smelly underground world of the subway. (People, wise up-it is not a coincidence that you go underground like a troll every day to be barfed up an hour later onto the surface to enter a slave-master’s domain. Think you’re any different because your job is “helping the world”? Its slavery nevertheless and will stay that way until our world and its masters start respecting the holistic individual). I was waiting for the A train, when a middle aged man with dirty-blonde (in every sense) long hair clad in jeans (pants, jacket and shirt) started to stumble towards the benches where I was standing. The man was drunk; he was clutching his forty-ounce in a crumbled brown paper bag that reminded me of life at the corner bodega before plastic bags. He suddenly burst out in chorus, air guitar and all, to the lyrics of Nightrain, except he changed it to match the train he was waiting for. So goes his song: 

Loaded like a freight train,

Flying like an aeroplane…

(pause)

I’m on the A train,

Bottom’s up!

I’m on the A train,

Fill my cup!

I’m on the A train,

Ready to crash and burn, I never learn…

I’m on the A train,

I love that stuff!

I’m on the A train,

And I can never get enough!

I’m on the A train,

Never to return!

I found it very humorous, and it did add a smile to my journey home. I had to hold myself back from joining him in song because I do know the lyrics and appreciated his spirit… I changed my mind when his attention turned to singing about my legs.

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