The Gravity of Hell

It Isn't Slavery, Merely Inhumane, Our Petty Existence

I’ve been staying calm, kids. Not because Unka Bing is being medicated or scared of popping a vein.

Nope.

I was waiting, teeth clenched, for the exact moment when the universe shat out its perfect cocktail of idiocy.

This morning it did.

09:15 – Approach St-Paul métro for the daily grind. Normally it’s waves of feral secondary-school sprogs clogging the entire 12-meter-wide stairway like entitled little emperors, forcing my swinging elbows and stomping feet to clear the necessary space like a metaphysical machete in thick Amazonian forest, of their adolescent solipsism in order for me to descend.

Today? Not just a few dozen arrogant adolescents. Instead, a fuckpile hundred of little Spanish student trip tour fucks milling around idle, while hysterical chaperones and teachers herded them like panicked hens for a rush-hour métro assault. Who the FUCK schedules a mass field trip of foreign teenagers to hit peak commute hours, turning the entrance of the métro into a protest blockade?

It’s not the kids’ fault. They seemed docile and well-behaved enough, preparing themselves for the lifetime of submission ahead of them. But the idiocy of their chaperones and teachers caused this sudden suppuration of humanity. How do you round up a hundred kids in one place unless you are fake immigration agents targeting non-white American citizens? Apparently you tell them to block the entry of the métro while these gilipollas perform headcounts over and over again until they get a number that seems right. Can’t go losing school kids on your school trip to Paris now, can you. Imagine the yeabook infamy that would cause.

Still, a special gold star in hell for the glaikits who engineered this clusterfuck.

Finally, I managed to push and jiggle my way through them to get to the bottom of the stairs only to find the swell down there was even worse. The first itchings of a métro hell. Now you had hundreds of normal commuters trying to exit, and hundreds of normal commuters trying to enter, plus hundreds of these Spanish school children loitering in the middle while their nanny state chimp trainers tried to begin yet another head count before the morning caffeine had even hit them.

All anyone wants to do is move yet no one can. It’s a beautiful moment of human gridlock, a static equilibrium which I did not bother to navigate politely. I don’t know about the rest of them but I’m not going to be late for work just because of poor logistics. So push and shove. It’s a rugby scrum until finally I squeeze through them to daylight, little bodies knocked over and scattered in my wake as well as more timid commuters who shuffled in place one foot then the other, waiting, like somnamublist livestock, for a chance to move through.

Some kid shit his pants. He was from a village called Illán de Vacas, population of 3. So this class pilgrimage to fuck the rush hour plans of hundreds of thousands of commuters made him nervous, scratching at his exema which in turn, made him lose control of his bowels. He was sweating agoraphobia pellets while the mouth of the métro began to reek of three week old cocido manchego dripping down the back of his pant leg.

My time is too valuable to me to spend it waiting for someone to resolve the situation so I resolved it myself, cutting through the bullshit of goat rope humanity and finally making it to the platform.

09h30

I finally reach the platform, thankful to see the métro arrive, thinking the ordeal was over. But lemme tell you kids, this pestilential inchoate welter was just the beginning.

Once the métro pulled in I could see it’s straight-up Indian-train rooftop apocalypse: bodies clinging to doors, hanging off sides, sardines in their preternatural brine. Ligne 1, already crowded but survivable under normal rush hour conditions, is now bloated with refugees from a catastrophically broken RER A (Europe’s busiest rail line, with 1.2 million daily commuters) dumped into the queue like raw sewage, all of whom try to funnel themselves on to my train to get to their workaday prison cells.

Tokyo’s oshiyas, whose job it is to physically push and squeeze passengers into already packed train cars when they struggle to fit in, look like millycoddlers compared to this hell. People crushed, gasping, feral. Pure, distilled morning rage.

Doors open onto a wall of meat.

Sweat. Coffee and garlic breath. A trapped morning fart circulating like mustard gas.

Elbow to elbow, face to face, the trains arrive already choked. There isn't room for a ghost’s shadow to slide in like a sheet of tissue paper, yet somehow we heaving half dozen bastards still find a way to wedge in. We have to. Even here, in a country where you have to kill a man to get sacked, we are terrified of being a minute late. It isn’t fear. It’s a pathological determination. We are desperate to reach the tomb before the door slides shut.

So your brave Unka Bing plunges in, elbows like pistons, head down, sac à dos slamming left and right, carving out just enough space to keep the phone raised in front of my face while I ride, scrolling the alerts about why RER A is shut down. Everyone else has their face in someone’s back or nose shoved into a stranger’s armpit, thank (fuck it’s winter and not summer because these scene in summer would have smelled like a mix of rotting corpses and three day old bratwurst gutty belches recalling intestinal interior chaos,) but I had my phone out reading mass transit traffic alerts between scrolls of social media doom.

What I learn is that this chaos is caused by what they term «accident grave de personne» which is transport-speak for someone stepping in front of a train, shuts down Europe’s most overloaded line right at rush hour.

They tell us that consequently the rest of the line is, «très perturbé». No shit, Sherlock. What they should have warned in all caps is “STAY THE FUCK HOME. DO NOT TRY TO GO IN TO WORK”

But that would require honesty. Instead, today is one of those bullshit “il faut faire avec” days meaning fuck off and suffer quietly, your boss doesn’t care how much you have to bear, so long as you show up, even though télétravail is readily available. Because working from home is a privilege kids, conferred upon you only under extreme conditions, like nuclear war.

So, what you get is a trainload of suffering. Not train-to-concentration-camp level misery, let’s not get confused. Our privation and horror is never so pronounced. It is more like death by a thousand paper cuts and these, ladies and gentlemen, are your morning paper cuts, rubbed in vinegar and lemon juice.

And all this, friends and neighbours, is just to get to the feckin grind. This is a piece of piss, a cake walk in the park compared to the calumny of theatrical incompetence I’m going to be climbing into when I go through those front doors, the glory gate of ShitBubbles Inc.

***

I see the building now. Wedged between all the other shitty buildings. I do my daily narrow sidewalk slalom, jumping from sidewalk to avoid pedestrians walking side by side so you can’t get by, to street to try and avoid ongoing cars, delivery trucks, motorcycles that ride between the traffic and the kerb, finally leaping back on to sidewalk to swerve aroujnd giant strollers and rubbish bins.

Once I am finally inside, the air is filtered, climate-controlled, and utterly dead. 09:44. I badge in. The turnstile clicks. I'm not late, but I'm already gone.