I paid $17.50, I deserve speed, right?

I just got off the second train, which I had boarded mere moments after getting off the first train, the train that stops two blocks from my apartment. I'm now on a bus, sitting here, kicking it, looking warm, absorbing electricity from a jack in the back of the hungover sunglassed girl's carpeted captain's chair into my lap. My body is on the bus with the slowest wi-fi in the history of wi-fi enabled buses (a six month history that fourteen Harvard students are writing their Ph.D. dissertations on---they're scheduling a conference entitled "An Interdisciplinary Look at Social Mobility in the Wired Autotransport post-Adolescent Low Leisure Class.")

Once the bus decides to leave here (another bus has mechanical problems so we're waiting to cram their passengers on here) we will ride from Boston to New York, from Puritanland to Dutchland, from the nation's smart city to the nation's money city. It's like going from one century to the next, the varnish being stripped away by the acidic and purifying hands of progress. Manhattan may be all Grey Poupon and shine and designer shoelaces now but you can still feel the power and energy and "life" oozing from the sidewalks, feel it even when you can't see it. This is where America happens. This is the capitol of the human universe. You know how when you're broke as a joke and you come to the richest person you know with your ass in your hand and you say, "I need help"? Usually you don't then get to make demands on what you're going to do with the money. Gimme the money in pennies so I can make wishes at the fountain. Obama lives in Washington but America lives in New York.

The present: middle aged lady just got on the bus, set her stuff down on a seat in the front, went down to the back of the bus (where I'm sitting) and looked at every person. The driver said, "Do you need help finding a seat?" She said, no, I'm just seeing who's on the bus. Then she spies a vaguely exotic looking woman, points at her and says to the driver, "Check that woman's ID." Why? Just do it, make sure it matches the ticket. "I saw a woman, looked just like her once." And? It scared her? Made the blood run into her frozen brain? The driver lets Foxnews return to her seat and smiles back at us, us enlightened.

(How come no crazy person ever picks me out as the lawbreaker? Why am I never judged unfairly? I'm rocking: Detroit hat, blue blazer, bright orange t-shirt and I'm getting the benefit of the doubt over here.)

Here we are, here we are, paying tolls. Hopefully in about four hours I'll step into the capitol of world capital and figure out how to get on the number one train uptown. Get off at 103rd, walk to 106th, try to pretend I look New York enough to be a Columbia student. Who knows what wonders this big ass backpack could hold? Wait for the M60 bus, take it forever, stay on after the college kids get off, stay on after the PS kids get off, stay on until Harlem bleeds into Queens, then residential residential Queens bleeds into airindustrial Queens.

Before midnight, barring mechanical failure or subway collapse or highway robbery or Foxnews flipping out at the reststop and taking fascist control of the state of Connecticut, I should be in Detroit. Detroit, the ex-world champion, she never learned to keep her hands up and eventually someone punches harder.

Tomorrow, my uncle will be in a casket and we'll all show up in American cars. He was as wonderful over the last few months as ever, questioning everything, maybe America is too big and too complex for its old structures, maybe we should reorganize the state governments into larger, semi-autonomous regions. Maybe we need to let the old shells fall away. He hadn't figured it out yet, but he held the idea in his head and played with it. He felt the tension between the old city falling away, and the new one bearing down, felt that uncertainty in his bones, looked forward.