Coney Island

'Now, at last I fall before

The Fountain of Lamneth

I thought I would be singing

But I'm tired... out of breath

Many journeys end here

But, the secret's told the same

Life is just a candle and a dream

Must give it flame'

-Rush, The Fountain of Lamneth (1975)

Day Two of life after finals. Not great.

Yesterday we decided to go to Coney Island to eat a hot dog at Nathan's, which has sat at the foot of the boardwalk there for over a century.

We should have noticed that we were mostly by ourselves for the hour or so subway/train ride across Brooklyn to the end of the line at Coney Island. Stepping off the subway we found Nathan's directly across the street, relatively uncrowded except for a few folks there for a graduation, judging from the caps and gowns worn by a couple of them.

The hot dog was, well, sort of forgettable. I think Sabrett offers a better product. We also ordered a fried clam roll because it was on the menu, which was passable but at $21 cost roughly a dollar a clam.

Afterward we walked a mostly deserted boardwalk on a blustery afternoon. PCB may be hopping this time of year, but it seems that Coney Island doesn't come to life until after Memorial Day.

We had thought we'd find a glass of wine somewhere, but as it happens Coney Island is mostly a depressing, poor sort of place where there are zero places to sit down and imbibe, save a Korean fusion restaurant with enormous televisions and an ambiance of a 1980s TV talk show set. We didn't stay there long. With nowhere to go, we found ourselves sort of stuck because I had a 2 pm Zoom meeting, and we didn't have time to make it back to Manhattan by then. So we ended up standing in the Coney Island subway station for an hour while I attended my meeting, hitting mute every few seconds as a train roared overhead.

The trip home ended in a diversion of the F train into Chinatown. The station there was filled with cops, and we later found that the rerouting was due to a train striking someone at the P Street station in Brooklyn. Peg says this happens regularly, with some mentally ill person pushing a victim onto the tracks. Reading the news, this is the second subway station death in a week---five days ago someone recently released from the psych ward fatally pushed a visitor from Pennsylvania down a flight of stairs up at the 145th Street station, where we disembarked in search of fried chicken a few days ago.

So I guess this anthill of humanity is a little more dangerous than it seems--36 fire fatalities this year, folks getting hit by subway trains. We've just been fortunate.