Despicable Creatures of Evil and Doom

This past Saturday I was in the city for the day--I had some stuff to take care of in the early afternoon, and then I met up with Joe and we went to have sushi for dinner in the village. After dinner, we had a few drinks at a couple different places on Bleecker Street. It was a lovely day, and at around 11 PM, we went to Penn Station to part ways--Joe back to Long Island; me to Morristown, NJ, to stay with my gram for the rest of the weekend.

I missed my 11:11 train for silly reasons I won't get into, so after Joe caught his train, I sat in Penn for an hour doing a NY Press crossword, waiting for the next train.

About a half-hour into my wait, in what seemed like a blink of an eye, hordes of the most vile, destructive, contemptible creatures flooded what had been a moderately empty Penn Station. I'm talking hundreds (maybe even a thousand or two) of the worst lifeform imaginable: teenagers. They were such wretched, unthinkable beings--puking and spitting and drunk and high and crying and screaming into their cell phones and yelling at each other from across the train station. It took about 30 seconds of this nonsense for my nerves to fry.

Not wanting to be run down when trying to get to my train, I kept a close eye on the board, and when the gate was announced, I was among the first to get to the platform and board, even though those little disciples of Satan did their best to plow people over to get to the train. Seats were being taken at lightning speed, so when I spied a woman my age sitting in a two-seater, I asked, "Do you mind?" And she responded, "Are you kidding? I'd rather have you sit here than one of these hooligans," as she gestured at the teens falling over each other to grab seats. Our seats faced the empty space at the front of the train car that's available for people with wheelchairs and whatnot. That space--and every other available space on the train, including the walkways--was filled to the brim with teenagers. Cussing, shouting, know-it-all, drunk, dehydrated, horny, obnoxious, evil teenagers. And to make matters worse, since there were so many of them, it took about 10 to 15 minutes at each stop to let everyone off who needed to get off. What is usually a 45- to 50-minute train ride ended up being more than 2 hours long!

At one point, the woman sitting next to me said, "This is the longest train ride in history." I agreed, and said that I didn't know why it was taking so long. She looked at me and said, "Because we are in hell."

Update: There had been a sold-out performance of O.A.R. at MSG that night, and apparently every teenager in New Jersey had to go see it. Vile creatures.