I'm at 5th Avenue and 59th Street.

I'm not sure where this train is heading.

I switched trains. I'm on the seven Flushing Local now. I can see Manhattan in relief from out of my train window. This train is hot, and the air outside is hazy. I got on this train at Queensborough Plaza. Now it's heading for Flushing.

This is 52nd Street and Lincoln Avenue.

This is 61st Street and Woodside. I've turned into the private eye again. I'm looking at people - scanning them. A bum is sleeping. He has no shoe laces.

I got off at 74th Street and Broadway. This is Queens. I'll transfer, but I need a bathroom first.
 

I'm descending a stinking escalator back into the belly of the city. Its guts have a rank stench. The light is thin. The single bathroom on the station is locked. I can hear steam being released, the earth rumbling under passing trains, screeching steel wheels on steel rails, the guttural roar of the rumbling carriages hauling through the cavitary tunnels. Hissing pressure release, again. Bleeping door-close alarms. This bottom part of the station is called Roosevelt Avenue and Jackson Heights. It's 3:27pm.

My thoughts, when not centered on what train to catch or event to observe, stray and focus on pillars of stability and normality. They seek to naturalize the pressing sensation that what I'm doing is disconcertingly abstract and - fittingly - off the rails. I only have a couple of hours left in NY and instead of going somewhere doing something, I'm just riding these uncomfortable trains. The feeling is unfamiliar.

By the way, I just realized, this an F train. Whatever that means.

I'm probably the only person in here who isn't going anywhere. I think of home in Berlin, my friends Dennis, Felix, Tim, Wilmersdorf, my district, Mitte, my favorite hangout. But the hindsight/ foresight streaks of imagined reality don't stabilize this experience. It's just this moment, just now, me writing, sitting, needing to take a leak.
Queens Plaza, here. Where do I need to go?

I'm going back to Manhattan. I'm crossing the bridge to Lexington Avenue. I want to exit and do something but I won't. I have to defamiliarize further.

The linoleum reminds me of a kitchen. I wonder what it would be like to know any of the passengers on the train.
The conductor just announced, "Welcome to Manhattan!"
I want a pair of Air Jordan's # 4. A guy here is wearing them, and they look dope. Next to me, a woman is reading the paper. I could glance at it, but I refuse because it would make me feel as if I'm just ordinarily taking the train.

I got off at Rockefeller Center, 47th - 50th Street.

How to read a station, a taxonomy inspired by Borges' arbitrary encyclopedic order:

In Other Inquisitions, Borges describes the following classification of animals:
"a) belonging to the Emperor, b) embalmed, c) domesticated, d) sucking pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous, g) dogs runnings free, h) included in the present classification, i) which gesticulate like madmen, j) innumerable, k) drawn with a very fine camel-hair brush, l) etcetera, m) which have just broken the pitcher, n) which look from a distance like flies."
 

- Can you transfer there? Can you pee there?
- Is there a subway map? How many phones are disconnected?
- to be continued...

I'm ready to take either a B, D, or Q train. Uptown, Bronx, Queens. One of them.

How to disarm this feeling of weirdness!?

I concentrate on going back to Boston later on tonight. But in the face of this project even Boston seems surreal, the germ from which this bizarre fruit is growing. I mean, I set up this experiment in Boston...hardly does the idea of return provide real comfort! I try to concentrate on Berlin, but it is so far away, spatially and temporally: until I return there, I've got a paper to write, an exam to take, my family in Miami to visit.
Paradoxically, events are unfolding too quickly. They're overpowering. I'm guffawed. How to make sense of this? I'm not a tourist - stabilizing narratives have been unhinged. What remains?

I need to pee.

Will this be worth something or is this just pencil on paper? A still life trompe-l'oeil of note-taking?

This is a Bronx bound B train. In my car, Japanese tourists are engaged with a baby. To my right, an old black man in a sweaty shirt is having a soda through a drinking straw.

He just left at 59th Street. The train is air-conditioned.

If I focus on the immediate, the train's floor, its linoleum, the grime, the seat colors, orange, red, yellow, the scrap paper on the floor in the corner, I feel a certain perceiver's distance and at other times the wholeness of an accustomed user. I am as much an object in the car as is the empty bottle and the discarded business reply mail. I feel comfortable looking at the corner in which these items lie. I am experiencing a feeling of familiarity with it. I'm part of it. My analogy to the accustomed user is faulty. This sensation clearly goes beyond it. The car is my living room. I wouldn't find it odd to clean up under the seats. I don't use the train, I live in the train.

Just this second, a passenger took a seat in my corner! Clearly, coincidence has not ceased to haunt me... Now he lives there unless I stay on longer than him.

Outside my car, 125th Street just passed. It doesn't matter. I can't imagine anyway where I am on the overground scale taking effect outside the skin of my car.
In here, I feel pretty comfortable. I like this train. Maybe it needs a name: Home-train? Living-room-train?

Should I change again soon? Well, it's nice here, but I don't want to go to the final stop and then retrace my route. Somehow, to backtrack would feel like a waste. It wouldn't be floating. Let me check the map. It's 4:08pm.

I'm at 155th Street and 8th Avenue. I might get off at the next stop.
The moment has almost acquired an autonomy of sorts. I don't care anymore. I don't bother to think about it - I just let it go. I don't worry. I blend into the moment in the train. It feels holistic. The phonetic proximity to 'holy' surely can't be a coincidence.

I got off. Right after finishing this sentence. This is 161st Street and Yankee stadium. I might transfer, let's see what's on offer.

I took to the green line, the # 4 train, heading downtown. As I'm standing on the overground platform, I can look out at the Bronx. Yankee stadium in front of me, behind me tenement blocks. By the way, at the station there was no rest room, just the police office with its ironic sign, adding insult to injury.

The sign on the photograph says, "No public rest rooms!"

The Bronx seems to be buzzing with life. Too bad I don't have the time to go down into the borough.

Just as I finished my roll of film, the train arrived, and I started going back toward Manhattan. I see a couple cuddling. Instantaneously a question popped up in my mind: Is this a home-train? It seems narrower, one finds it harder to colonize a corner... Let's settle for 'guest-room'.
 
 

The dirt and stench is combated by fluorescent blue 'fireflies' and swarming red-dots pivoting between patches of orange veils, who in passing dye the interior of the train, its silver doors and panels, in their streaky brightness.

Sometimes, if the tunnel lights are close enough by the window in the tunnel, an orange cloud forms right in the middle of the carriage between the doors and panels.

I'm at 86st Street. Windows in the train are all screens. When the train is static, the scratched tags appear from above the surface of the screen as light floods in from behind. Like secret ink exposed to lemon juice.
When the train is moving, the screen contains the passing frames of a filmic exteriority. Projections of light, tunnel light, cast on the screens. As a passenger, one notices that the train travels a distance, surely, but this distance is entirely constituted by the passing frames of light, the filmic exteriority. For the traveler, the movement of the train can not be charted in relation to the overground exteriority. Once one exits the station, that overground exteriority reformulates, reconstitutes, repositions itself in relation to the train - a connection that is undone once one enters a station.
The relationship car-exteriority is established in entirely different terms overground and underground. I beg the reader to bear with me. This monologue, based again on the dialectics of inside and outside, occurred toward the end of my journey, after long exposure to defamiliarizing practices.
Fortunately for train users, this disjuncture does not reorganize points within either exteriorities. 'A' will still be 'A' in relation to 'B' overground. But if one rides the train between 'A' and 'B', their relationship collapses for the duration of the journey only to reconstruct itself upon exiting at 'B'. The disjuncture does not render arrival at 'B' impossible - although ideally one would emerge at 'C'.

To summarize: The train is moving but along different lines than AB. It has its own exteriority, geography, distance traveled - that of the filmic frames. Fortunately, when one returns overground, one is nonetheless at 'B', as if the train really went along line AB although it clearly didn't. There occurs a disjuncture that paradoxically still makes travel possible. An ideal train, an utopian train, would spit you out at 'C', the point along line AC, which can be traced in relation to the exteriority of filmic frames. Line AC implies a screen-window and line AB a window-screen (in terms of line AB, the dominant geographic paradigm is the overground topography perceptible through the window. Thus the screen becomes secondary. The functional term is window-screen and vice versa).
For the subway traveler, two worlds collide, the utopian (or heterotopian?) underground and the more obvious overground. The phenomenon occurs at all times and can be experienced by all passengers. Unless, of course, they choose not to look.
After three hours, I would say, I caught a good glimpse.
 

It's 5pm. I'm at 14th Street and Union Square. The experiment is over. I am ready to exit the subway and go home.

I'm walking down 14th Street toward 8th Avenue where I got on.
I feel estranged, odd, out of sync, as if waking from a surreal dream, sobering up from a delirium. I need to clear my head. I frown. Something feels wrong.
I'm paraphrasing loosely from Debord, how did it go? Only in the false can there be a moment of truth?