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Love Letter to London
As I left work a fine rain began falling on the city. By the time the bus got to Buckingham Palace road the wind had pushed the clouds far enough away so that the sun was out and the rain was falling at an oblique angle. The road and pavements looked like they had been sprinkled with diamond dust but the Underground beckoned.
Deep underground, in the very veins of the city as the metal and plastic carried me to my eventual destination I stood listening to William Orbit's Water From A Vine Leaf watching the other passengers. The girl with her bared midriff. The balding woman talking to herself as she ate squares of chocolate. The tanned family who must have been tourists over from some sunny far off land. And the freaky guy highlighting passages in the Bible and reading them silently to himself to see if they'd make a cold-blooded thing to say to a motherfucker before he popped a cap in their ass...
Nevertheless there we all were being whisked off to our respective destinies twenty or thirty feet below the surface of the planet and I had to smirk. The future really is now. Only we don't call it the future, to us its just the present. The latest gadgets and gizmos don't amaze us as much as the stellar leaps forward portrayed in science fiction, but then those are only so radical because everything has been changed, warped forward in time, rather than the one step at a time stuff we live on a daily basis.
I arrived at my stop and upon resurfacing, leaving the underworld behind, I saw that the surface world was dark and wet but all the colors were vivid and bright, a stark contrast between the washed-out neons of the tunnels below. I wouldn't be the only person to say they loved the city when it's got that newly-washed feel to it...
Apr.30.2003