Washout

I read an article last week that said Hollywood is starting to feel comfortable about setting disaster movies in New York again, citing I Am Legend and the still-untitled J.J. Abrams monster movie (some folks are thinking Overnight is the title, we'll see) as examples and quoting the omnipresent Paul Dergarabedian as saying New York is ready to get trashed.

It's the sort of midweek fluff that would garner a chorus of whatevers on any Manhattan street, but I couldn't help but think of it this morning (during the four and a half hours it took to get to work) as an odd harbinger of what would come to pass when a freak tornado dropped three inches of rain on the five boroughs in two hours (which has got to be some sort of math question on the Meteorology SAT). Had that chatty bastard "Box Office Paul" brought this upon us?

The transit system completely melted down, yet another indication that the subsystems in New York, the ages-old designs that can't support today's huge population, are ready to fail in a colossal fashion. I wish all we had to worry about today was a giant pissed-off upright-walking lizard borne from nuclear waste. At least then the damage could have been avoided by taking the shuttle train to the other side of town. You couldn't get anywhere today. I tried four different train lines before I got one that would take me into Manhattan, and that last train had more smelly people on it than anyone should have to face without a Hazmat suit.

Here's what it looked like, thanks to YouTube:



By the end of the night, however, all is well. The wife made it home all right, the three of us ripped into a great pizza pie (half mushroom, baby) and my Metsies won a squeaker after Billy Wagner made a tight game even more nail-biting. I even did some brainstorming on a script premise that's playing out in reality with some friends of ours, could be interesting. Bad day, pretty good night, not a total washout.