Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Magical Mystery Tour

Sometimes I pretend that the subway cars are being pulled by a pair of green and gold dragons. If you close your eyes you can hear them roaring and screeching as the train speeds through the dark tunnels under the city. And you sort of have to imagine that the conductor has a whole freezer of horse steaks in that first car to keep them satiated. But he can't feed them too much or they might grow complacent and not really give a rat's ass about pulling the trains anymore.

If you look out the window fast you can sort of see little gnomies taking a break from mining to watch the train pass, silhouetted by their lanterns at the mouth of tributary tunnels snaking off into the darkness. What are they always mining in there? Probably we'll never know.

One time we had to stop for like 10 minutes or something due to a disabled train ahead of us. One of the dragons was acting up. It actually would not budge one inch. Anyway, we were just waiting there and I noticed two of those little guys reflected in the window across from me (i.e. directly behind my head). I didn't want to turn around too quickly for fear of frightening them, so I simply watched in the reflection. They were a bit timid at first. However, we were towards the back of the train, far from the dragons, and once the gnomes discovered this fact, they didn't seem to have any fear. They jumped up and down, laughing and talking to each other, pointing at us, throwing little pebbles at the side of the train, calling for their friends to come and see. It was pretty cute actually.

But MAN did those little suckers take off when we started up again!



And that is why everyone should take mass transit.

4 comments:

Bbear said...

Congratulations!

That was excellent. I read that aloud to my friend Christian, and he laughed. As did I.

I look forward to seeing you next weekend, weenit!

Katie said...

I can't wait... :)

Katya said...

Hmm. This is what they teach you in traffic engineer school? ("What is your proposal for increasing efficiency on the red line?" "We believe that by feeding the dragons a diet that is higher in protein, we can increase the speed by a value that will more than offset the cost of the dietary change . . .") ;)

Katie said...

Good thing they teach us how to solve ODEs... actually to tell the truth I don't really remember how to do any of that stuff.