I know that I'm going to be accused of anti-dead bias here.

I know that.

But for people who supposedly don't give a shit, dead people can really be control freaks.

From the smallest room in New York City comes a show that gives you a reason to live.

A 65-year-old subway conductor beleaguered on the BMT Broadway line late Saturday night,

counting down the lonely last five stops past the weird orange bricks of 49th Street

in a reluctant stop-and-go express toward the terminus.

New Rome's latest underground architectural miracle and the cleanest, quietest, new penny one island platform recently minted.

The room wide open on all fours presenting unobstructed views of nothing.

But the glowing fluorescent femurs lighting the ever upward escalators with ironic

excelsior signage that drop you uneventfully one one floor higher, with a gentle hop towards the

street-level stairs. Ninety-sixth Street Station, an unexpected delivery on the promise of the

fabled S-A-S, still two phases shy of the theoretical time when the city's least-experienced tracks

will carry the modernized cars of the future

turquoise tea from the heart of Harlem to Hanover Square in violent Brooklyn. Just past those

orange bricks and rounding the final turn to the home stretch and stretching his 65-year-old

Langs and walking with surplus purpose conducting a routine

car-to-car sweep of the drifting machine, superfluously shaking hands-only figure-eight's

baton-free on the slow-cornering yellow bullet.

Just a regular Saturday night, caught a passenger snoozing, just as the iron wreck coasted

to a 57th Street stop at the 7th Avenue station.

They're joining me now, Seth Barron.

...