I Work From Home and You Don't

There are always too many people milling around the station. They have time to sit around, read a newspaper, have coffee or breakfast, or wait in line to buy a magazine or a winning lottery ticket out of this rat race. Well, that is what it's all about. I mean we all want to get out of this rat race. 

We know the rats are winning. Remember that ugly blue-striped building? We go to work every day so we can some day stay home and not go to work. There are plenty of good jobs in the city, plenty for us to leave when we get tired of the crowds, the endless walks, the broken sidewalks, tripping potholes, sudden-stopping tourists, Bible spouting commuters. 

If we look long enough we'll see Murray the groundhog frolicking in the safe zone under the catenary wires. Murray is fat, dumb and happy. He doesn't have to commute to work in the city. Neither these days does Proud Mary, nor I. I write from home.... 

Continue reading This Seat Taken

Riding Under the PATH Train

We are gliding under the Witt Penn Bridge in Jersey City. There on the north side naked trestles await the next generation bridge. The thunder we hear riding under the PATH train bridge! We are clear soon enough to see the commuter train exit the bridge heading west to Harrison and Newark.

PATH commuter train travels parallel to the Passaic River in northern New Jersey.Anthony Buccino 

How many times have I been on that PATH train while we stopped as the bridges were drawn to let some tall masted ship pass by? From where we stood, sardine-like, in the tin can railcar, we could only ever guess at the holdup outside. How many times have riders looked north from those trains and guessed at the real name of Fraternity Rock rising from the swamps.
Our Hackensack Riverkeeper boat tour is heading south on the Hackensack River. We'll cross Newark Bay and head up the Passaic River to the Route 3 bridge north of our group's Nutley hometown.

Capt. Hugh Carola, just call him Captain Hughie, explains what we pass on the shores: a power plant here, a peak-power plant there, a jet-engine power plant there, an abandoned power plant yonder.

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This Seat Taken? Notes of a Hapless Commuter

This Seat Taken? Notes of a Hapless Commuter
By Anthony Buccino

If you ever commuted to work, you'll enjoy your ride reading Anthony Buccino's latest collection "This Seat Taken? Notes of a HaplessCommuter" about the joys and follies of getting to and from work in the city using public transit.

Buccino's bus and rail commuting tales and observations are collected in this new 224-page book which is available in print, on Amazon and Nook.

Buccino spent 12 years editing business news copy at Dow Jones & Co. for the Ticker, NewsPlus and The Wall Street Journal professional web pages in Jersey City and later at the NewsCorp building in the Times Square district of mid-town Manhattan.

For his first year working in Jersey City, Buccino actually drove the 12 miles each way to work and home. An average commute would take 20 minutes to reach the city and at least another 20 minutes to cross the city to his parking lot near the Hudson River. It wasn't long before the crosstown traffic and the monthly parking fee, nearly enough for a car payment, persuaded the author to use mass transportation to get to work for the first time ever.

For 11 of those dozen years, he rode public transportation including NJ Transit buses, Newark City Subway, Port Authority Trans Hudson's PATH trains, the occasional NYC subway and DeCamp buses.

For five years, Buccino wrote about commuting and transit in metro New York-New Jersey for NJ.com. His transit blog on NJ.com earned the New Jersey Society of Professional Journalists Excellence in Journalism award. Many of those blurbs are gathered in this collection.

Public Transit Gives Us Reasons To Complain

"That's what we do. Complain.

We complain the cars are cold. We complain the cars are too hot.

We complain when the cars leak water in the rain.

We complain the fare's too high...."

Continue reading: Commuters love to complain

'most useless drivel'

Yep, that's me being referred to as the author of "most useless drivel" and you can judge for yourself.

TRAVELLING with the DEAD

It's a curious book of poems by Carole Stone
to be reading on the PATH train
a couple of weeks before Christmas.

---

More new features than ever. Check out the new AOL Mail!

Medium Dead Zone

I checked out the next time that psychic medium, author and lecturer, John Edward is going to be in New Jersey.

For the Sunday, Nov. 13 event in Edison, tickets are $175.

I think that’s just to be in the “Gallery Like Group.”

I knew someone who went to one of these things. She was hoping to hear from her mother.

Heck, she even wore a bright orange blouse so her Ma could spot her easier through the ether.

Nothing happened for her at the event, but when she got home her pressure cooker exploded. She figures that was her mother yelling at her for being so gullible.

Hey. It COULD happen.

Someone told me there’re a lot of dead guys waiting to say something to me.

Perhaps I’ll wait and count them when I get to heaven (if that’s where I’m going?) Or they can reach me through my local contact, no?

Personally, I get a kick out of those TV shows where someone touches someone or something and sees stuff as it was or might come to pass.

The touch is a wonderful thing.

(Years ago I heard anecdotal evidence that the touch is stronger than a professional opinion. Supposedly, a psychiatrist told a long-time patient to do something, and when he followed up to ask if she had, she said, no, because her hair dresser said not to. The logic was that since her hairdresser touched her she had a closer connection to him. You wanna believe, believe, no believe, no believe.)

TV characters touch a person or object & see things – Johnie Smith in Stephen King's The Dead Zone shakes your hand or touches your sleeve and sees a possible future and he gets to change it.

Allison Dubois in Medium sees dead people & talks to them. She has to ask others whether or not they can see the people around her - so she's sure if they are spirits or not. She dreams a lot. Fortunately, her dreams help her solve that week's police case.

Remember the pet psychic? Sonya Fitzpatrick? She’ll do a private half-hour phone reading with your pet for only $300. Or you can get a gift certificate for that hard-to-please someone or pet in your life.

Maybe you should just take your dog to John Edward’s seminar at that hotel?

Can the people around me hear my thoughts? I wonder about this as I commute.

The lady with the short pony tail talking the whole PATH ride to the nerdy guy with a baseball cap, can either one of them hear what I’m thinking?

Or do they have to be dead?

I hear sounds from someone who is not speaking.

The sound is coming to me over the music in my headphones from across the PATH car.

A ha!

It's coming from his headset.

Damn, it's loud. Loud enough to wake ... oh well.

Copyright © 2005 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved.

John Edward

Five People You Meet In Heaven

USA Network Series The Dead Zone

The Dead Zone TV

NBC Medium

Sonya Fitzpatrick

At Spatola's Home For Funerals

Copyright © 2005 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission. Updated May 2008

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Down Public Transit Lane II

My mother told me when I was a little kid that if I wanted the bus to show up, all I had to do was light a cigarette. She said that as soon as you lit a cigarette the bus would show up and you'd have to put it out.

She never smoked, so I guess this was an old wives' tale she once witnessed.

We've seen the queue for the bus and those smokers choking down the last puffs before the bus is going to pull away without them.

Sometimes they take the drag, drop the cigarette and exhale, then get on the bus.

It sucks when they take the drag, drop the cigarette, board the bus and then exhale.


Ever been on the light rail when the public address system is one stop off?

It drives the tourists nuts!

Have you ever ridden into the old Heller Parkway subway station and looked into the park? If you did you'd see piles of garbage in the fence behind the maintenance buildings.

Hey, we're not talking Burger King wrappers, we're talking big heavy pieces of crap that should have been cleaned up a long, long time ago.

Isn't it weird that the place called the maintenance yard is such a pig sty. Some day maybe they'll clean it up ... it's been there for years and I would practically stake my pension that the trash will be there when I'm dead and gone.

Copyright © 2005 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission.

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PATH Car Away From Ninevah I

With special dispensation in my pocket, I found myself on the PATH car heading from Exchange Place to Newark, full of people, okay, crowded, but moving along. It's only a 15-minute ride, so we'll play Charlie the Tuna for a few minutes.

How bad could it be?

At Journal Square we picked up more people than we dropped off and the place was so crowded we bled inside each other's wounds, so to speak.

That's when I noticed the youngish blond haired guy reading the newspaper. He was sitting in the last seat of the row near the door.

Next to him, standing like two deer in the headlights were two old people. They had to be in their 70s, or older.

The young guy read his paper. Then finished it and tucked it under his leg on the seat. He dug deep into his parachute pockets and began fiddling with ear phones and an electronic device the size of a cigarette lighter.

He seemed oblivious to the old people clinging to the safety bars at his right. He didn't see the wrinkled elbows just inches from his nose.

I've always felt that you are where you are because, because that's where you're supposed to be.

Somewhere past the place where the overseas containers are loaded on the rail frames and our next stop in Harrison, the train stopped.

I wondered should I ask the guy to let the old folks sit? Or should I mind my own business.

Perhaps I could ask to borrow his paper, and if it was in English, then ask him to help me read the sign he was sitting against... WON'T YOU PLEASE GIVE THIS SEAT TO THE ELDERLY OR DISABLED

The rules of the road seem to ignore what your mother might have told you about being a good boy.

Here, if you don't see someone in need, they don't exist.

It wouldn't surprise me if the blond guy drives his car the same way.

After we stood there a few minutes, stopped in the prairie, waiting without a word from the famous PATH speaker system, I realized this was all my fault.

We were stuck here in the middle of nowhere, and going nowhere fast all because of me. I was heading away from Ninevah, I was like Jonah trying to ignore my duty. Soon they'd cast lots and I'd be groveling in the gravel.

Without anybody saying anything, to me or to the blonde guy, I knew we'd be sitting here in the nether land until I dug into my pack, pulled out a pen and paper and told you what I see from where I stand.

Granny's elbow nearly took his eye out. But the blond guy sitting in the last row, he never noticed.

What would you do? You're on a crowded PATH car and it's stopped for no reason in the middle of nowhere. You don't know whether you'll be here another minute, five minutes, ten minutes, or over night?

Out the window we could see the billboard advertising a TV show: Criminal Minds.

Maybe we should wait until Granny passes out on the floor. Then we could step over her on our way out.

Would you get invovled?

Would you ignore it?

I looked at the blond guy's shirt and tried to read his company logo. Maybe it said D Drive?

Here in car 121 near the end of the PATH train we couldn't hear the conductor or read the script on the blond guy's shirt.

- more -

Copyright © 2005 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission.

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PATH Car Away From Ninevah II

Staring real hard at the embroidery on the shirt of the blond guy sitting in the end seat of the crowded PATH car stopped in the middle of the meadowlands for no apparent reason, it seemed to read C Drive Technologies. We Make It Happen and on the sleeve it read HP Internet Stew, or something.

It was 625 and we had been on this car about a half hour. We were stopped about 10 minutes or so, so far. And we weren't moving.

Looking out the window, it didn't look like we were going anywhere. We had about a half dozen tracks on each side of the rails where we waited. It would take TV's McGyver to get us out of this one.

Gram has golf clubs embroidered on her horizontally striped blouse. The three and five clubs have numbers on them. Pop has flowers on his shirt like he was from Florida or Hawaii Five-Oh.

They both wore K-Mart blue jeans. And when they spoke to each other it was with a Southern accent.

Gram looked like Central Casting sent down an actress to play a sweet grandma who would treat the kids to milk and fresh baked cookies. Even though she looked like she was tiring, her old blue eyes sparkled as she stood next to Pop.

Pop leaned against the advertisement between the last seat and the door. He held onto the rail and Gram. With a rugged tan and his yellow-grey hair slicked back, he looked like Nick Nolte at 80.

The rail cars lurched forward like a hiccup on New Year's Day.

We strained to hear anything from the conductor a dozen cars away and then the car stopped again.

HARRISON

The train moved and we soon saw the Harrison Station on the wrong side from usual. We were on the outbound track heading in. The blond guy unfurled his body from his nap and clambered out the door.

We parted a path like the Red Sea and Gram and Pop sat. They breathed a sigh.

So did some of the folks around me.

We disembarked onto Platform C instead of Platform H as usual. No one knew where the stairs were and we followed the leader like the dazed lost sheep that we were.

People are not like homing pigeons. You put them in some place strange, change their routine and they get messed up, lost.

They follow the unofficial leader of the flock who may know the way to the ground or the main concourse lobby.

You end up, then, following the crowd and breaking off when your turn comes along just like a homer with a strange flock on race day - each bird in the flock on his own way home.

No thanks to the PATH folks we figured our way down and out from high Platform C.

Aha! I saw the bookstore and realized this was not too far from the subway stairs and another leg home.

- more -

Copyright © 2005 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission. Updated May 2008

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Platform H (Wednesday PM Commute I )

Going home I got the CD player to work. Sort of. It only played one song over & over. And only in one ear. If I tilted my head like I was thinking real hard, I could hear El Paso in stereo.

But El Paso was like the flashback music cue …
In 1961 I was the fastest gun in Belleville, N.J.
It ain't boasting if it's true.

Back in the day who would have challenged me and my two six guns?

My cousins Tommy & Bobby next door? They wore six guns over their PJs!

My cousin Billy Boy, that fan of Yancy Derringer? Not a chance. (I thought he lived near Montana in Rutana States and went to Styretowne to shop, but that's a local joke.)

I could act out the entire El Paso song by Marty Robbins. We got the 45 at Prosperi's Market on Bloomfield Avenue in Newark. It had that famous picture of Marty in mid-draw.

The famous Robbins

I’d start out as a hardened cowboy sitting there as “Felina would whirl.”

Then I’d be the angry cowboy who shot the “dashing and daring” young cowboy to prove my feelings for the “Mexican maiden.”

Then I’d hop on the arm of a big fat armchair and gallop off “to the badlands of New Mexico.”

But I’d be weak, like the cowboy in the song, pining away for Rosa’s cantina and Felina. I’d ride hard back to “the hill overlooking El Paso.”

I’d whup that chair to a froth, the hooves to the quick and head for Felina until I was surprised by “five mounted cowboys” and then “a dozen or more.”

I made a lot of noise firing my six-guns over the back of the couch into the big mirror at the men keeping me from Felina.

Some times I was reloading when I felt that “deep burning pain in my side.” I clutched myself and tried to stay on the arm of the armchair.

I could feel myself getting weaker, like all the TV cowboys did.

A wince and I struggled against the bullet “deep in my chest.”

Off the davenport now, the room getting dark, my pistols out of reach, “from out of nowhere Felina has found me…”

Then, that mushy part, “One little kiss, then Felina, good-bye.”

And with that I slumped back spread eagle on the rug, in front of our Motorola TV. Some times I was half-slumped in the toy box.

The song played over and over. In one ear mostly.

The blond and her mother, or maybe a best-friend, stood in front of me. The blond would have won ‘best looking on the crowded PATH car’ if there were a contest.

Her dirty-blond hair straight as an arrow & held in place by a wispy strand. Not a hair was out of place. She looked like she could have been a cheerleader not too long ago.

And when she carelessly ran her fingers through her hair it seemed like a Clairol commercial with Farah Fawcett or one of Charlie’s other angels.

Her pink top was as lightly colored as her rich deep ruby lips were dark. Her bling-bling and baubles were in all the right places, as far as I could see.

If she saw me writing she acted coy. If she saw how I wrote this she tried to act like she didn’t care.

I clung to the upright post and scribbled this, of course, in the hope I’d be able to read it later.

If the blond even looked at me, I probably looked like a drunk man scribbling nasty things to his ex-wife.

There, in the distance, the lights of Bears stadium and good old Platform H.

For me, anyway, H is halfway home "for one little kiss ..."

Copyright © 2005 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission. Updated May 2008

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Ballads & Trail Songs

Gunfighter Ballads & Trail Songs

Twin-Music Lyrics - El Paso

Bob Dylan - Desire

Romance In Durango

Walkman

Preacher Man (Wed. PM Commute II )

H is for almost home!

Down three flights of stairs to the NCS Light Rail. A car is pulling in. I grab a seat and then see him.

“Brudders and sisters,” the Preacher Man says, “I am here to tell you the news about heaven …”

He always waits until the car pulls out of the station before he begins.

“I used to smoke, cheat, steal … Jesus gave me a new …”

You figure it isn’t easy to preach the word to these bones, these bones that ride these rails. The ones who hear him won’t give him the time of day, so to speak. The heavenly choir riding that peace train home is tuning out the song.

“Jesus came into this world to seek and to save that which was lost …”

On my fractured CD player, Marty Robbins sings in my ear. Yes. El Paso. One of the songs I can’t hear is about the bad cowboy saved while rustling cattle. In the song lightning stampedes the herd and a strike splits a tree into the shape of a cross and the bad cowboy sees it and is saved from his evil ways.

Kind of reminds me of the Sgt. York movie when lightning shatters the rifle Alvin is carrying.

Norfolk Street and the Preacher Man’s still going. I've been running in to him for about four years. A lot of good it did me, eh?

The walking dead are trying to tune him out. In desperation to get his baritone droning out of their heads they read the ads posted overhead. It doesn’t matter that they are written in Spanish "Su Dinero Cuando Usted Lo Necesita" – make funny sentences by mixing up the meanings of the foreign words.

This must be the 20th time “from out of nowhere Felina has found me.”

You remember, of course, that I got the CD player to play – more or less – in one ear, depending on a jostle here and there.

BUT it’s only playing ONE SONG over and over & I can’t reach down to get it out of my pocket to re-set it.

Here goes the “handsome young stranger lay dead on the floor.”

My fingers have given up & I’m writing in a fist. You could wonder – but my hand is asleep when I need it most.

Preacher Man got off at Bloomfield Avenue. I hear a lot of buses pass that way.

Our car rattles on to Davenport Avenue and Branch Brook Station.

Two more modes of transportation, "then Felina good-bye."


Copyright © 2005 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission. Updated May 2008

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Gunfighter Ballads & Trail Songs

Twin-Music Lyrics - El Paso

Bob Dylan - Desire

Romance In Durango

Walkman

Rain's a Coming (Wed. PM Commute III )

This September night looks like Ophelia headed our way and the sky is dark and menacing.

Finally the bus pulls up. It’s been here but only now put its lights on so we’d know if it’s the one we’re waiting for. The other busses sit with their lights out, the drivers on break. I suppose the riders need a union too?

There’s a good crowd but plenty of seats. I sit sideways in the old people seats behind the driver.

He weaves the giant bus off 5th Street through cars parked on both sides on Anthony Street to the light at Sixth Street.

Off to the left, you can’t see it now because it’s long gone, but once, before these senior skyscrapers came along, right over there, next to where the gas station is, that’s where the pony rides were located when I was a kid.

Did I tell you I was the fastest draw in the wild west city of Belleville, N.J., in 1961? That’s when Marty Robbins wrote and released El Paso. Oh. I did tell you. Wait until you get old and start to repeat yourself!

DRAW!

At the stop across the street from Clara Maass Medical Center, on gets Bam-Bam, a regular who hops this bus to Centre Street in Nutley to catch the 13 to Belleville which is where we are now. It’s a perfect example of “you can’t get there from here.”

The metal tip of Bam-Bam’s cane is bursting through the plastic cap. I don’t know his name, but when he talks to the bus driver, he ends his sentences with Bam-Bam. There are a lot of regulars on this bus, and except for Jimmy the magician, I don’t know their names, and that includes the few I have conversations with.

Bam-Bam looks like the actors Herb Edelman and Herschel Bernardi. He talks loud and clear and doesn’t care who hears what he has to say.

I got up from the senior seat for him and took a seat further back as Bam-Bam climbed aboard. Ahead of him a guy who seemed okay gets on and takes the seat I left.

Someone else got up from the opposite senior sideways seats and Bam-Bam plopped down, looping his cane in the hand-hold bar.

Bam-Bam thanked the guy who got up. I nodded as if to say ‘don’t mention it.’ But I don’t think he ever saw me either get up to give him my seat or nod back to say not to mention it.

My first wife calls that putting bricks in your house in heaven. All I did was give the guy a seat.

The 6:53 No. 74 Bus to Paterson is flying me home in the early dark of the night. I’m wondering if I’ll beat the rain. I know my umbrella will stay dry – it’s hanging on a doorknob in the basement.

In the silhouette of the night the few remaining buildings are backlit by the fading light as they wonder will they too be part of the Essex Park housing development or turned into rubble before the leaves change colors.

I turn off El Paso and pack up the Walkman.

Against the odds I sat safe and dry in my little red wagon. Before I could pull away from the curb the sky opened up. Driving home was not unlike a long ride through a car wash tunnel.

Copyright © 2005 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission. Updated May 2008

Gunfighter Ballads & Trail Songs

Twin-Music Lyrics - El Paso

Bob Dylan - Desire

Romance In Durango

Walkman

Herb Edelman

Herschel Bernardi

Lady in Blue Shoes (Morning Commute)

Tapping her well-manicured fingernails on her expensive black skirt, the woman in the powder blue blouse and vest held her other hand back and the source of the music only she could hear and the wires that delivered it to her ears were invisible.

Every full PATH car has at least one beautiful woman on it. She's usually surrounded by so many sleepy people - men and women, night and day - that her countenance is unnoticed. But sometimes you can spot her.

This morning, this woman stood in full view & I could see had no wrinkles in her clothes or skin. A brief glance revealed a perfect young face framed in perfect brown hair.

The young man standing to my right was staring at and through her. He was amazed at his lot in life this morning on the Newark PATH to Jersey City and beyond.

She, meanwhile had perfected the invisible stare that all beautiful young women must master (or be overcome by their own beauty) and she tapped her fingers against her rich black skirt listening to music that must have made her happy way down yonder in her soul.

I fumbled with my free paper, squished my AM New York into my backpack and retrieved the tattered and battered old Walkman.

I tried to juggle and jiggle the antique CD player and the mismatched earphones from some long ago trashed player.

Spinning around there the Marty Robbins Gunfighter Ballads & Trail Songs wailed and gurgled in one ear or the other then blasted in both ears before cutting out all together.

With each bump in the rickety PATH rail the music popped, chopped and crackled in my head.

Stereo sound strained out of my earpieces if I tilted my head & looked off into the distance like someone sitting for a senior high school yearbook picture.

The noises I heard were not comforting the savage breast, but most irritating.

It took me back to long ago when vinyl record albums skipped - instant headache - & the only earphones you could get were huge and made you look like a pilot on Twelve O'Clock High.

Twitching with the odd sounds in my head - a woman off to our side held a nonstop chat at the door facing off into the spacious mews oblivious of all around her cringing on each word like fingernails dragged across a blackboard.

The beautiful young woman before me traveled through the meadows with all of us but you could see she was alone somewhere swell as the music played through her head.

A blast in my head said, "I caught a good one it looked like it could run ..."

And I saw before me a young woman whose beauty could start a war, who could make a bishop punch his fist through a stained glass window.

Her blue shoes seemed like sneakers but anyone who spent what she did on the rest of her fine clothes would never wear SNEAKERS you know.

Anyway her shoes had a blue cloth cover and no backs so they looked like a hybrid sandal tennis shoe when I knew I’d seen something like that on the incredible shoe show on late night TV when they sold Birkenstock shoes as if they were the latest thing.

Those shoes were around 30 years ago. I think I read about them in a novel called Housewife that was written back in the 70s. It’s about a woman who is less than satisfied with her weight and her husband. But when I read it a while back, I saw that it mentioned Birkenstocks and I thought that everything old is new again.

"Aloha, pretty girl," I wanted to say, “do you ever weary of the weight of your beauty?” But, alas, Exchange Place flashed in the dirty windows. Every man & woman for himself as we melded towards the escalator.

Up she walked ahead. She was much shorter now that I was standing too.

A skinny man with lint on his pants' butt walked ahead and between us as we scaled the moving stairs.

At the top I went north and she went south to the place where forgotten names, memories and faces go.

Copyright © 2005 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission.

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Gunfighter Ballads & Trail Songs

Twin-Music Lyrics - El Paso

Bob Dylan - Desire

Romance In Durango

Housewife

Twelve O'Clock High

Birkenstock

Walkman

AM New York

Poor Bishop

Poor Bishop

She read her book without wearing glasses
her head down, deep in thoughtfulness
Her silver neckaces rested in her cleavage
Her toes and toenails clear and healthy
and her sandals out of an old Roman movie

It was enough to make a grown man
put his fist through a stained glass window
or make a bishop cry
Read the full version in Voices on the Bus, train, subway, sidewalk and in my head

Copyright © 2005 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission.

Raymond Chandler: 'It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.'

Your Inner Kerouac

"explore your inner Kerouac".

"Listen to Your Innner Kerouac!"

"Release your inner Kerouac" (a billboard quote)

PATH poster, Exchange Place, Jersey City

Can you imagine what Jack would say about being part of a state's tourism advertising campaign?

After all these years, 55 years ago there was Town And The City, then in '57 On The Road, and before you knew it he was gone. And forty years later you're reading a blog about him. Don't that beat all?

A long time ago, Allen Ginsberg & his dad, Louis, did a joint reading at Rutgers in Newark.

Allen recited a poem about that mentioned the Gorny & Gorny Mortuary, and the train line going through Belleville, my home town. He played something like an accordian or a squeeze box, and before you knew it, we were chanting along.

I don't think I ever heard a poem before that mentioned my home town - at least not one written by world-famous poet, nor a poem that mentioned things I had seen on my own.

Allen told a story about being mugged for his wallet. So they got his wallet and left him his worthless briefcase filled with $20,000 of manuscripts.

Louis was known for his newspaper filler called O-Pun Mind that used verse and puns. They ran in the Star Ledger on the editorial or op-ed page.

Anyway, to make a long story short, at the reception afterward, I asked Allen for advice. He said, "Keep breathing."

Wow. I bet even (my future music critic partner) John Narucki was impressed, but I never thought to ask him.

Then Allen said he wanted to spend some time with his father who, back in the 1970s, was already an old man.

Maybe I should have asked Allen about Kerouac and those old days?

The Independent Press of Bloomfield ran the story I wrote about the reading: Anthony Hears The Ginsbergs. I guess you can find it in the library. I have a copy in my attic, with my copy of Kaddish, and my copies of The Town & The City, On The Road, Dharma Bums, Desolation Angels, and Pip.

Up in the boxes and the dust are a lot of paperbacks I bought way back in the day at the Paperback Book Store on Bloomfield Avenue in Bloomfield Center, Bloomfield, N.J.

Who knows, I might even find the rejection letter I got from City Lights Books when they said they didn't want my poetry. I bet that would look good in a frame, or on my web site.
Some day, maybe it'll turn up in a tourism ad for some state that rhymes with New Jersey?
How does this catch-phrase grab you:

Turn yourself loose, take a ride with Uncle Tonoose

Or this one:

Hop on the caboose with Uncle Tonoose!

Or:

Turn Out The City Lights
&
Turn Loose Your Inner Tonoose!

Kerouac dot com

The Official Jack Kerouac site

Copyright © 2005 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission.
Updated May 2008, Jan. 2020

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As someone who uses public transportation as part of a balanced work commute, today I thought I'd leave my digital camera at home in the event I look like the random person who should be inspected.

I do feel nearly naked at work without my digital camera. I have two disposable film cameras in my desk. One camera has a few shots taken (of what, who remembers?) And the other camera is in its plastic see-through pouch.

I shouldn't feel so naked, you know. After all, it's not like I have no camera.

This weekend, in fact, I joined the camera phone club when I replaced my two-year-old wouldn't-hold-a-charge cell phone. In addition to transfering a few phone numbers to my new phone, I had the task of trying to figure out how I kept taking pictures of Zamboni - whether or not I wanted to take his picture.

My daughter pushed a series of buttons and one of the dark Zamboni pictures is my screensaver. Who ever heard of such a thing on a telephone?

For my part, I was able to maneuver around the name and phone fields in the phone book to enter my vital names. I read on Barista Net this morning about cell phone emergency numbers and how to put them where others can find them ICE - in case of emergency. Perhaps when I remember how to update my phone number, I'll try it.

Today, at lunch, I look forward to reading the phone book. Doesn't that sound exciting? Perhaps, if an audience gathers, I shall read aloud ... and soon everyone will want to nap under the Harborside willows.

Bag It - Bag It Light

One thing about storing the digital camera at home was that it resulted in a lighter back pack, relatively speaking. It being a Monday, the restocking day, there were many supplies to lug along the trek.

For instance, there was the celery, carrots & apple pack. Not to mention the Ice Tea bottle that remains warm in my desk until I add ice. And then there is the donut-bagel alternate: the fresh box of whole grain peanut-butter Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

Not to mention, stuffed in one or more of the many zippered pockets, the last three days' newspapers, being the Ledger & my-neighbor-down-the-shore's NY Times. Don't worry, I deboned the Real Estate, ad supplements, and sports sections.

BTW, the new cell phone is not noticeably different from the old one. It does have a little spy lens to it, something James Bond would have had 40 years ago, and my daughter figured out that the antenna extends.

Picture Less Path

The last time I took photographs on the Path, the conductor told me that wasn't allowed. I put the camera away. No sense arguing with a conductor. He's just doing his job. No?



I checked into my Harborside links and lo and behold, on the Path site, in the rules & regulations it says you can't take pictures on the train or of the rails or the tunnels or anything without a Path personnel escort.

They don't want to know nothing about your blog, or your railroad club, or your newspaper boss named Perry White.

Fortunately, on earlier Path trips, in cars further back from the conductor, I had taken plenty of photos. There are sunrises, and distant buildings rising like Oz in the distance. And a photo or two of the seemingly endless run of tracks stretched out ahead to infinity.



I think I've gotten some great photos. Artistic photos. In all, I've got more photos of Jersey City than I could use in a new volume of
Jersey City - Images of America.

All those photos still leave me looking for the next one. Each time I walk down the street or along the water, I think to myself, I've seen everything. And then, and then, of course, I see something I have not seen before, right there. Right where it's always been and where I've passed it again and again.

So, officer, that's why I have a camera ;-)

Copyright © 2005 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission.

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I'm Not Gepetto

I heard the word before
& I've seen those porcelain dolls
they sell on TV at night
but yesterday
when I stood next to you
on the escalator
to the PATH, well,
when I looked at your face
& your almond shaped, sparkling eyes
& perfectly smooth skin
I thought I was looking
at a doll from the TV
& you were that dollface.

Your face is indescribably perfect.
It is perfect
but not the only face of perfect.
It always surprises me
that someone as beautiful as you
would ever talk to me, a gnome.

I'm no movie star.
I'm no rich man.
I'm old
with fat ankles
& lines in my face
& getting older
&, of course,
I mean nothing
by saying hello.
It's just that when you do
it's as though a ceramic doll
came to life & I am
Gepetto
or someone else
equally lucky.



I save words in my head
that travel well to paper,
& need glasses
to read what I wrote.

Your face, your cheeks
& yes, your eyes
remind me of photographs
I've seen of my mother
at about your age
& funny as it seems
my father once upon a time
called her dollface, too.

By Anthony Buccino
Copyright 2005, all rights reserved