The Newtown Pentacle

Lost in the bowels of the subterrene, in today’s post.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Innocently enough, while on my way to a photo industrial complex exposition at the Javits Center that I was lured to by the promise of a small payment for participating in a focus group, a major crisis suddenly came rushing up and seized a hold of a humble narrator. One was busy staring at his shoes and pondering how my life had brought me to this pass, when the realization that I was the only person on the 7 train crashed like an ocean wave across the fragile shoreline of the psyche. The sudden manifestation of a thousand nightmares was upon me.

An inflation of my self esteem began to roar like a cataract between the ears and behind the eyes, coupled with a sensation that was both spiritually distracting and which generated uncountable bad and unprofitable ideas – all at once in a rushing torrent of intent.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

My self importance was deflated by the solitude, as I had no one to impress – with a nervous rattling off of some historical minutiae about the Flushing line IRT’s history. What am I without my narcissism? My eyes were pinned wide open in a wild stare, and became uncomfortably dry, as I seemed to have stopped blinking. After a quick check of pulse rate and a crack of my knuckles against the plastic seat to confirm that I was in fact awake and not lying in bed – unconscious and hallucinating – it was decided that this was in fact the waking world. Knowing that nobody back home in Queens would believe me about being alone on the 7 line, my trusty camera was deployed and evidence collected of this momentous event – that I, I of all people, was utterly alone on the subway.

Surely, this would be the sort of thing that would draw the interest of all…

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Bouncing from side to side of the light rail car, which was positively hurtling through the stinking concrete bunkers beneath the megalopolis, suddenly paranoia blossomed in my mind when I realized that in the next carriage there was another singular occupant like myself. Perhaps the focus group at the photo expo was nonexistent? Was this some sort of exquisite trap laid out for an elite group? I sensed the presence of the hidden hand, the shadowed elite, the supranormal, at work. Nothing is random, everything has meaning – I read that on a greeting card for sale in a gas station convenience shop once…

My thoughts raced, and flights of ideation began to assail.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The train ground to a halt, with an electronic recording announcing that the delay in forward movement was because there was traffic in front of us. I wondered if my counterpart in the next car realized, as I did, that this was some sort of trick. Anything can happen when you’re alone and without witnesses. That’s why, like the band TLC advised back during the 1990’s – I don’t go chasing waterfalls and stick to the hills and valleys I’m used to.

It was my hope that when the skeletal remains of myself, and the other, were eventually found at either terminal stop – Flushing or Hudson Yards – that the images on my camera card would be recoverable and offer some sort of explanation to Our Lady of the Pentacle as to my fate.

Of course, then the train started moving again and I found my way to the Javits Center, but this was a close one.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Back at home, one found nothing but difficulty in attempting to sleep. There were machines moving around in the sky, some of them carrying Policemen. I set up the camera and watched…

Who can guess, all there is, buried down there – or moving around through the aether, up there?

As a note, the next morning, my facial skinvelope exhibited the dermatological effects characterized by exposure to the burning thermonuclear eye of God itself. I have no explanation to offer.

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