1,460 or 5,844 to 18,926 or 23,741.25. The number of commuted days before the passenger realizes that each one of them was the dream of living after the successful suicide of the evening before.
The subway has its attention vacuumed into an aspect not seen in the adverts, for it is not happiness or sadness or contentment or confusion but a blank stare not witnessed by itself, unwitting but not unknown, wherever two or three are gathered in the name of whiling time upon a threshold subsidized by its own labor and whose gross goods recharge the reigning title of consumer protection.
First do no harm. An axiom formally born of humility is here adapted to the patent admission of the limit of alleviation relative a collective acquiescence to the pyramidal pecking order. One order under another, it's regular acceptance of brilliant minds under the influence of empathy, it shaves away at their resident dreams daily, fueling the process whose nightly execution might be the lonely station where responsibility is taken for the resulting projection of hollowness.
First do no harm. At first, a relief, it was not long before it got depressing. But we've come too far to give in to depression even in the face of the death of conceivable optimism. With any luck whatsoever, we may balance the throwing up of our hands not with our washing them of our shortcomings, but...
I don't embed the image to afflict, or suggest a solution, but to exorcise my own liability, limited as it may be according to our own account. No such stroke of luck is evident in doing no harm that cannot expunge its numbers from the books or cause the cause to go unregistered. Illness is what it generates at both ends, perpetual in the present perfect term of the twisted mind.
This tube I'm surfing is not a mine whose walls are of an element that would power its commuters to the next stop, let alone to work in the Congo, but it is happening now, an ever-present dynamic, no one free of its influence, which is anything but empathetic.
Within a structure such as this, no matter how empowered, one can point up and kick down because public liability is limited and shareholder value knows no harm. Someone said sin has a price. The chart says it's stable. Science says it's rising. People say the price is good. People say the price is bad. I am of the people. My ability to harm is under control, as is my empathy, neither of which do a deal of good. But neither does a depressing admission of a crushing defeat. Unless it's in good company. Seize the day!
