Subway Diary

“A man with a leather suitcase running near an office building” by Armando Arauz on Unsplash

I have very little idea why I feel wide awake at 6am, this morning, out of all mornings, on the way to a very long day of training for a new job — why I feel clear and almost happy — except that I’ve mastered a very good method of preparing coffee. But because I make coffee the same way every early morning — or regular morning — and do not always get this result, I have go searching for other, metaphysical, rather than biochemical, reasons for my sense of buoyancy.

This subway diary — as I’ve called it — is often one of despair; I have little doubt that by and large it will remain one of despair: an account of my thinking about the fate of my soul inside an incredibly complex, blinding, and ultimately spiritually stupefying system of exchange and power that I sometimes call hyper-capitalism…. But it is also, I hope, can also be, an account not really of hope or better yet faith, but rather, of levity and lightness: of those moments that escape the heaviness of so-called ordinary (read miserable) life.

Photo by Alex Holyoake on Unsplash

I used to experience more of these moments, admittedly; and when I was younger I hewed much closer to lightness than heaviness. For this reason, I instinctively associate getting older with the increasing drag that is exerted on…