Sleepy Heads

Every evening, when I board my bus home, I notice a trend that is not one to be proud of. I notice that exhaustion is a new way of life for the working poor and the vanishing middle class. Each evening, I watch and wait, along with the countless other work weary riders, on lines to rival a good day at Great Adventure. Except that at New York City’s Port Authority, a line is never a good thing and there is almost never a good day.There will be no thrill ride at the end of this line.

Exasperated and exhausted we stand. Some are reading books, or magazines, listening to iPods, staring blankly into space, trying to gauge how many seconds of sleep they can steal while standing along walls and past ticket vending machines. We’re all heading towards the few gates to buses that will drag us all out of the City limits. Once we have managed to be within eyeshot of the coveted bus, we begin to pray, peeking at the red-lighted number counting the boarding riders. We watch…36, 39, 44, 51… If you see any number in the early 50s and there are at least five people ahead of you, rest assured that this will not be your bus home. The worst is when you think you can be the last one to sneak on and the bus driver yells down to you on the well of the bus steps: “Standing only!” For a minute or two you ponder the idea: “Do I want to stand on the bus all the way?” Well, one day I did. That idea was all sorts of wrong. So I never have again. It was a treacherous ride of bumps and stops and go that had my head reeling when we reached our destination.

On days when I manage to find a seat, I am amazed by the sheer number of folks whose heads keel over the second their depleted bodies hit the seat. For the rest of the ride, it’s like watching seat after seat of bobble heads on a dashboard. On some days, I count myself among them, as the sleep comes so easily when the body has given up all strength.

What a sad bunch of humans we all make. What exactly makes us fight so hard to be so pooped? What don’t we know here, that other countries of people know elsewhere? Vacation as a guilty pleasure? It shouldn't be that way. We should think of vacation as a right of the worker. Where does it end? I once heard a saying: “I’ll rest when I’m dead.” A variation of that is: “I’ll lie down when it’s time to get in a coffin.” Morbid, I know, but more and more people seem to behave as if that is the only time we have to rest. Truth be told, there are some days, when I reach a mid-Friday afternoon ride back, when I can barely keep my head up, let alone think about the weekend for any other thing but sleep, and all I wish is to be in some far off, secluded cabin reading a book, or sleeping. Yet, the weekend comes and there are still a million more little things to do, accomplish, commence, or draw to a close. And then it is Sunday night and we’re as drained as if we’d never left work at all – and then we have to start all over again. Then on the ride back in, I ask myself yet again: “Why do we do this week after week, year after year? And no one been able to give me a good enough answer to my question. Sleep tight!