The Oh Well Train

No man is an island except a man who lives in Williamsburg because the L train, his lifeline between Manhattan and home and the parties he is just slightly too old to attend in Bushwick, is definitely going to be shut down or at least crippled for many months or even years so there will be no way for him to get to any of those places, requiring that he be almost entirely self-sufficient within his tiny Brooklyn domain for upwards of seven years on weekends, but I guess that isn’t so bad since the Williamsburg Whole Foods is due to open later this year and the Apple Store will not be all that far behind it and wait what am I talking about because that man can and will have his groceries and his iPhone 7 delivered to him by a member of the non-employed-but-independently-contracted servant class — or maybe, if the L train takes that long to come back, by a drone — but wait a minute I totally forgot that because the entire public transit system is so intractably broken that not even the combined fortunes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett could completely fix it this man will probably opt out of it anyway within the coming months and years through the deeply discounted services of a sixty-billion-dollar logistics company that is slowly building itself into a privatized mass transit company because it would like to monopolize all transit, generally speaking, and at that point why bother spending all that time and money fixing one tunnel under a river which would primarily be utilized by people who don’t even contribute all that much to the app economy — only one Amazon purchase a week, and not a single Instacart delivery! — or the tax base to make up for the tax cuts President Trump put in place for everyone with a net worth of more than a million dollars. What a lonely man that man will be.

Photo by Salim Virji