Subway Reading

A man, a suit, harried-looking but respectable enough, buttoned-up, daylong-worn, surreptitiously pulls from his hard black briefcase an article printed off the internet. The story, which made its ephemeral wave in the mediasphere, in the PublikConscienceConsciousness, was New York Magazine’s “The Affairs of Men”, published on May 18th, 2008, in the aftermath of the Spitzer so-called scandal, and that of his successor-extraordinaire, the blind adulterer David Paterson, and of the dual-familied Congressman Vito Fossella, etc., etc., etc. — in the goddam aftermath of the Circe-sleeping, Telegonus-spawning Odysseus — the story, a semi-confessional look at perpetual male infidelity, the spermatozoa imperative, the unruly, ever-swimming flagella. Someone, perhaps he himself, the subway reader, took pains to print out this story on paper, and, watching, I think, reason dictates action.