The MTA, once again, is hitting the little people (no, not dwarves, per se; regular, everyday folks) where it hurts the most: our wallets.

They aren’t hiking the fares again, not just yet, but jacking up the price of a Metrocard is but one way to deplete the ridership’s funds. By curbing essential bus and train service, the MTA is denying New Yorkers the opportunity to easily travel to where is the best (perhaps this should be in quotes … read: highest paying) — or only — available job.

I know people who commute from Brooklyn to the Bronx because the latter borough is where they found work, despite that they already lived in Kings County and therefore could not easily relocate closer to work; nothing locally or in Manhattan availed itself to them, so they took what did.

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Almost everything I experience sticks in my mind. I have so much information in my brain that serves no practical purpose, it’s patently absurd. My propensity to recall music lyrics or dialogue from movies is a useful party trick. I can even recall mundane details from other people’s lives, told to me in passing, that the people to whom it happened eventually cease to recall.

Having a long memory is so much more of a curse than a blessing.

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Page views are down because output is down. Not as though I’ve monetized this thing, so tracking how many times it’s been viewed is little more than an exercise in gauging the little niche of interest I’ve staked out.

It’s a good sign that a handful of people still will tune in despite nothing new to see, but if I alienate that readership by not providing new content, I’ll be back to utter obscurity instead of nearly utter obscurity.

The dearth of writing is the result of a dearth of inspiration. Sure, there have been things to write about, but as angry and vitriolic as this place can be, I’d much rather it not be used as an outlet for woe. Woe has been in large supply of late and using it for inspiration is like trying to fashion a skyscraper from literal horseshit.

On the train last night, a bum was making his rounds. But this bum wasn’t like the bulk of his cohorts. He wasn’t asking for money or selling a sob story for years on end about how his house burned down the week before … he was belligerent, abusive and confrontational.

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Coming up from the train at Times Square, the stairway that leads to the street begins with three steps up to a landing that is completely submerged by the torrent above. Stepping over it, I ascend the narrow stairway to Broadway.

It’s raining and I’d rather not get wet. I check to see that no one is coming down the stairs and I open my umbrella before I hit the open air.

An older, moustachioed Hispanic man begins coming down the stairs and I extend my arm upward, lifting my umbrella as high as I can so he can walk down the stairs and pass me without any obstruction.

He clears beneath my umbrella with ease. He smiles at me and says: “Thank you, my friend.”

“You’re welcome,” I reply, and I come above ground feeling good for once.

I got to the bus stop at Fulton St and Clinton Avenue and checked the schedule. Ten minutes before the next bus. I’d barely missed the previous one.

I weighed my options and decided to trek down to Atlantic Avenue to catch the B45. I got to the corner just in time to see it motor on by.

Walking back to the previous stop, I marveled at my bad luck. Moments like those make me wonder if there is a god and if he’s a royal asshole having a laugh at my expense. I needed less than a minute to have made that B45. It often feels like life itself is a series of near-misses. Lots what might-have-beens. It’s a sad commentary that the what-if I’m sharing with the public is “what if I’d caught that B45?”

Well, I’d have been home in less than the almost hour it took me to go barely two miles.

The B26 came and I got on it. Chock to the brim and hot as hell, I navigated my way toward the back door. There was an open seat so I set myself in it; the trip would be long enough to warrant not standing. Sitting put me between one teenaged black kid with loose curls and light skin and a big, bald, dark black dude with a surly demeanor who was chewing on a branch. He intermittently broke out into fits of rapping.

None of this disconcerted me. I’ve spent more time amidst black people than white people for at least the last five years of my life and I could probably argue that it’s been true of all seven years I’ve been here. Rather than disconcert, I felt amusement. Albeit wry and bitter. I had an epiphany, wedged between those two dudes whose wide open legs left me very little room, as I sweat from the heat of the bus…

“This is my quintessential New York.”

Eventually I got to a point where I could transfer to the bus that was going to take me home, and eventually it came. All told, it took me around 45 minutes to get home. If I’d a bike or a car, I could have done it in less than half the time.

Still, on that hot bus I had another epiphany. I’m always in a rush, even when — like last night — I had nowhere to be. I was going home. No appointment to keep, no fete to attend. The company I often had at home is away until the end of May. But I still wanted to get there, quickly, as quickly as possible. I wanted to make every connection, catch every bus in a marvel of great timing. But I didn’t have to. I had time. All the time in the world. No one was going to fret at me if I got home in 10 minutes or 100.

I wish that realization had filled me with relief. Instead, it was almost disappointing that my mad obsession with quick travel was based on nothing except an irrational obsession with spending the minimal amount of time using mass transit.

There’s a logic in my mind about the distance I must travel to get places and get home. The logic demands that, in a reasonable world, it should not take an hour to travel two miles. It should not take an hour to travel six or eight miles, either. But it does. It can take an hour to travel a mile in this city if you get stuck in traffic or in a train tunnel.

I have no power over my ability to get places except to walk, which — while I have a long gait — is still a slow process, or to bike … and I have no bike and I’m not in a position to be putting myself at risk of injury just to perhaps get somewhere faster. But that powerlessness is what maddens me. When the bus crawls, I immediately want to get out and walk. Then the asshole god I mentioned earlier frees up the snare and the bus will race by … but only if I get out. If I stay on, the snare will never disentangle and the slow crawl will continue to chip away at my sanity.

Frustration and uncomfortability and disappointment are my quintessential New York.

It’s not an epiphany I particularly relished.

I’m sure, at some point in your life, you’ve heard the phrases “common courtesy” and “common sense.” Perhaps, at one point, both of these things were actually common, thus explaining the coinings thereof, but today … not so much. People are neither commonly courteous nor sensible. They are boorish, rude and moronic.

This morning, my girl had to catch a train at Grand Central. She had a huge suitcase, a backpack and a hardshell guitar case to carry … so I rode with her to the station to help carry the weight. At one of the IRT hub stops in Brooklyn, this large man makes a point of being one of the first people onto the train and then stops as soon as he’s through the doors.

I was right behind him and there were people behind me, all of whom still needed to get onto the train. I politely asked him to move further into the train; his hands were empty and he was in a far greater position to move into the center of the car.

“Excuse me, please,” I asked. “Could you please step into the car a little more?”

“I’m in the car. Why don’t you step in. Go around. Why should you get to stand by the door. You like the door? I like the door, too.”

Yes, that was his response. All of that. To my request that he do the decent thing and make room for his fellow riders.

I couldn’t go around him. My girl was there with her honking suitcase and a backpack bursting at the seams. It was an untenable situation only the big man could resolve by moving.

“Are you kidding me?” I responded. “If you want to stand by the door, be the last one on the train. You don’t own the goddamned door. You have acres of space and other people need to get on the train.”

“I like the door. Like you. You like the door … why should you get to stand there?”

Jesus, this guy and his fucking door.

“I don’t give a damn about the door,” I explained. “If you hadn’t pushed your way to be first on the train, I would have moved to the center of the car–”

“I can do whatever I want. I can stand wherever I want… You can go in the middle of the car, put that guitar between your legs to make room…”

“Oh!” I responded, turning on as much derision as I could slather upon my words. “What a brilliant idea … make room. For others? You know, the thought never occurred to me. You’re such a big help. Thank you so much.”

He finally gave up the argument. Fat fuck piece of shit. I was more than ready to headbutt him. I was wearing my contacts, so I had nothing to lose.

Selfish, discourteous people infuriate more than anything else in this world.

Americans in general are complacent, stagnant-minded pieces of shit. They are willing to embrace the status quo because their fear of things getting worse is far greater than their desire for things to be better. Ambition is a word so foreign here, the only reason it’s in our vocabulary is because our language is borrowed from the English.

Has anyone ever actually defined the “American Way” … because I would argue that — aside from being an utterly meaningless, rhetorical catch-phrase meant to incite patriotism (particularly the ethnocentric / xenophobic brand thereof) — it simply means “complacency” … the latest wrong to incite my rage against people too stupid and lazy to help themselves is a local one: the MTA is on the verge of raising our fares again and New York’s municipal leaders’ are sheerly too incompetent and greedy to protect their constituents from such gross abuse.

The MTA is an “authority” run by appointees of the Governor, elite people of the good old American values of “wealth” and “class” who rub elbows and hobnob with the political elite and are rewarded with lucrative positions running the aforesaid “authority.” The head of the MTA makes hundreds of thousands of dollars each year … a handsome reward for consistently reporting a deficit and budget shortfalls. People are fired from $10/hr jobs for incompetence yet someone who makes in the realm of $300,000 per year is not dismissed despite having a $300,000,000 deficit to his credit. That sounds like gross incompetence to me. Isn’t it bad business?

Well, it may be from a logical, outside perspective … but it isn’t bad business when you’re pulling down money hand over fist in salary and there is no personal consequence for your actions because people who largely make less than $50,000 a year will be the ones who foot the bill for your incompetence.

See, there is no incentive for any of these MTA appointees to do a better job because they are currently handsomely rewarded for being utterly inept. Why work hard and do well when you can not work at all and do horribly and still make a mint?

There needs to be a penalty for treating the general public so shabbily. Personally, I advocate the slow and painful murder of anyone involved in the executive operations of the MTA — after a thorough public humiliation. Sadly, the likelihood of such retribution is very little, so what the public should do is exercise its rights as members of a supposedly democratic society and demand change.

Boycotting the subways and buses would be a phenomenal step towards proving a point. If the public says “You’ve made it too expensive and now I won’t use it.” the MTA would have no choice but to submit because they could not sustain the system on no revenue. However, because of people’s aforesaid laziness and complacency, they will continue to ride the subway regardless of how expensive it gets because they refuse to walk, bike, run, carpool or otherwise. The MTA knows this. The MTA is taking advantage of the public’s lethargy.

Individually, I could never make a dent in such a corrupt machine. If I were to file and injunction and have to argue before court, I could do it … but publicly I would be attacked, dirt would be dug, I’d be outed as an offensively opinionated misanthrope and people would rather be financially fucked by someone who seems benign that helped by someone who is not.

However, if everyone who rides the subway would bind together and take unified action, the resistance would require no more than a few days to drive the MTA to a grinding halt and force them to re-evaluate fairer, more transparent practices.

My disgust for people in general arises from the knowledge that my idealist hope — for a revolutionary response to something that affects every poor and lower-class New Yorker — is a fucking pipe dream.

For the love of god, people can’t even take care of themselves judging by all the morbidly obese individuals I see on the subway every day, taking up two or more seats … it would be foolish to even entertain the belief that these lazy slobs could be motivated to anything but stuff their faces with crap.

Yes, I admit it: I’m a fool for even wishing that people would fight for something better. Those days are long gone.

I long for the days (which I could admittedly be romanticizing because I don’t personally ever remember them) where newspapers were advocates of the people who expressed the voice of the people and incited people to change things believed to be unjust and unfair.

This fucking country was founded because a bunch of rich guys didn’t want to pay a three-cent tax. Now we won’t even fight to save hundreds a year. Pathetic.

Standing on the uptown BMT platform at Union Square, an express train pulled into the station. I sidled up to the last door of the last car, making sure to be out of the way of the exiting passengers. A cute, little brown girl of some ethnicity then tries to get in front of me, blocking the doors, putting her little weight into me as if to move me. I’m not terribly weighty, mind, so her difficulty should say something about how minuscule she was.

I stood on a slight angle to the doors, left shoulder right at the edge, body slanted outward like the side of a funnel to facilitate people’s ability to get off so I can get on. The little lady was trying to edge me out, so I turned my body to perpendicular to the train, which forced her back.

She then tried to kick out one of my legs. She caught the right leg and moved it about an inch, which is unfortunate because that movement alone forced me to stabilize myself with my left leg, the one with no ACL, the one on which I’m getting surgery in two weeks. That angered me a little bit so I bounced her back again, this time overtly … and harder. Any genetic cuteness she had was long since erased by her obnoxious, me-first, I-refuse-to-wait-for-anyone demeanor and the ease with which she resorted to being physically abusive.

It was no surprise that she took serious exception to the foot-or-so she was forced to cede after the second bump, so I expected her to use the space to gain up the momentum she used to throw herself into me, screaming “What the fuck is your problem?!” like a deranged harpy.

With all of her weight behind her, she hit my right arm, jarring it enough to cause my coffee to spill all over an unfortunate, rotund Hispanic woman who was exiting the train.

“Nice work,” I said to the wee harridan. “You just spilled my coffee all over that woman.”

We got on the train and the little bitch went into the corner to sulk. She didn’t even try to take one of the many seats that were available, which made me wonder why she was so gung-ho to be the first one on the train. I sat down and rode the Q to Herald Square. She dropped her Blackberry on the floor during the trip and struggled to pick it up.

I figured there had to be more than just what transpired between she and I on the platform to motivate such unbridled rage in such a pint-sized primadonna, but I wasn’t too interested in mulling over whether she was on her period, that her boyfriend dumped her because she’s a cunt or any other reason (albeit, I’m speculating now that I’m looking for ways to eat up my time).

I transfered to one of the BMT locals at 34th Street and took it to 49th. At the turnstiles, a young Asian girl was trying to get onto the platform but her Metrocard wasn’t working. She was digging through her purse for an alternative, but she wasn’t going to find it, swipe it and make it through in time to beat the closing doors.

“Hey,” I said as I pulled my Metrocard from my pocket. “Go ahead.”

I swiped it for her and she said “Thank you” as she bolted through the turnstile and onto the train.

Was it pennance for allowing the situation at Union Square to escalate? That could be one interpretation. But I was thinking it was more vindication than anything. That girl needed to get on that train and I was in a position to make that happen, so I did. At Union Square, I was adhering to the practice of letting everyone off before I got on and I took exception to some domineeringly diminutive girl trying to force her way to the forefront instead of waiting her turn.

I don’t like to let people get away with things. It’s as simple as that. Like Walter Sobchak says: “Am I the only person around here who gives a shit about the rules?!” Sometimes, it feels that way. Society depends on people being decent and fair and I get seriously incensed when people are not, especially when it directly impacts my life … however small that impact may be.

This city has too many people for every one of them to be selfish and somehow expect this place to be anything better than an utter hellhole. Maybe the little lady will think twice about being a pushy twat the next time she’s riding the subway. Maybe I’m hoping for too much.

I do feel bad for the woman wearing my coffee, though. Luckily, she was wearing one of those nylon-shelled winter coats. It should be pretty easy to clean.

I say I want a revolution. Yeah. You know. I don’t want to change the world, just New York. I’m sick of the Welfare State policies. I’m tired of taxes being levied against me for everything short of breathing, for the purpose of funding broken policies and enabling to continue the kind of political corruption and the lack of social accountability that plagues this state.

This is why there is a provision in the Constitution for the people to maintain a standing militia. This country was founded after a revolution fought against England … over a three-cent tax.

Well, they want to tax a six-pack of beer by six cents. They want to add a .34 cent charge on every cigar. They want to tax movies and other entertainments by 4%.  Non-diet soda (this one especially enrages me … they want to punish those of us who can consume non-diet soda because we aren’t fat? Since when should the fit be forced to foot a bill that is fat people’s to pay?) will get an 18% tax applied to it. That is outrageous. Worst of all, David Paterson — this latest fool in the chain of gubernatorial fools — plans to increase spending rather than use the revenue garnered from his draconian tax-hike to close budget gaps. It’s moronic, asinine and damaging to the financial well-being of the citizens of this state.

I see a few options. Revolt, whether peacefully or violently, or move to another state. Either way, this latest assault on individuals already strapped by a failing economy — and under-average wages coupled with an exorbitant cost of living — must not be tolerated. Add to this the prospect of a monthly Metrocard costing more than $100 … it’s just another brutal injury atop the insult that’s already been added to the scores of injuries already inflicted by our uncaring representatives.

The New York political machine is broken. It is moribund and, most importantly, detrimental to those it is — theoretically — intended to represent.

Residents of Washington, D.C. protest on their license plates with the slogan “Taxation Without Representation.” What’s worse? That? Or being taxed to death by one’s supposed representatives? I never voted for any of these charlatans … yet I’m paying the price for blind party allegiance keeping these bastards in power, where they bleed us dry.

It’s got to stop.

Writing about the MTA has become a hobby of mine. I hate them and that hatred inspires me to expound on all of the wrongs they perpetrate against their ridership.

So they’re going to raise the fares again, and now are proposing an inflation-based fare increase to come every two years. I couldn’t care less whether they toll the bridges, but I do think it’s a ludicrous waste of money to build the tolls, and it will cause so much traffic it will boggle the mind.

Where are they going to put a toll plaza for the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges? In Brooklyn, I imagine, though it would require still a hefty amount of construction to accommodate these tolls. The Williamsburg Bridge would probably get them on the Manhattan side, but there really isn’t room on either bank of the East River. It’s moronic. Have you ever driven onto the 59th Street Bridge on the Long Island City side of it? It’s like wending one’s way through a hedge maze. Where the hell are they going to put those toll booths?

They’re going to further their debt by undertaking unrealistic construction projects in the hope that the toll revenue will not only recover the costs of construction, but also be lucrative enough to mitigate the budget gap. Sounds like wishful thinking to me.

I’d much rather see a practical solution to the MTA’s problems. And no, I’m not going to again claim that we fire and/or kill everyone … rather, I’d love to see them close some unnecessary subway stops. Does the 1-train really need to stop at 14th, 18th, 23rd, 28th and then 34th streets?

Close the 18th and 28th street stops and there goes all the money needed to maintain the station, including the money required to pay whoever is manning those booths. Close the 28th street stops on the Broadway BMT and the Lexington IRT.

That’s four subway stations that could be closed. I don’t know what is the figure for the yearly cost of operating a subway stop but, considering how wasteful is the MTA and how bloated are their workers’ salaries, I imagine it would be a decent chunk of change.

Obviously, closing four subway stations is not going to solve all the system’s problems, but it would help. We don’t have to deal with a Worth St. stop on the Lex IRT anymore … because someone realized it didn’t make sense to have a stop two feet away from the Brooklyn Bridge stop. Funny, that. On the 7th Ave IRT, they closed 91st street. Point is, it’s been done before … and for the better. So, why not do it again?