quislibet | (no subject)

Never got around to writing about Brittany yesterday, and probably won't today either. So you don't need to sit at your computer and hit "refresh" every ten minutes or so eagerly awaiting my deathless prose, at least not until tomorrow.

[Inserted later: what follows seems to have turned into a pointless rant about the evils of commuting through North Station/the Fleet Center, so if that doesn't appeal to you then skip it. Although you'll miss the small sample of N*Sync fan poetry.]

I missed my train home yesterday, of course, since the Green Line that connects work with the commuter rail is the line that, yesterday, connected the sites of two major sporting events as well as one N*Sync concert. (Or is that N'Sync with a more reasonable apostrophe? Apparently the asterisk is silent.)

Why, why, why, I have asked and will continue to ask, is a major sports and entertainment venue also a major commuter hub? The Fleet Center is just not designed to act as both, and the thing is it was built to be both just a few years ago. So not *well* designed, I suppose, is the more accurate description. From the narrow stairs that are often bottlenecked by ticket scalpers to the slow-moving confused crowds of sports or music fans who can't figure out -- and I suppose I can't blame them too much -- why some people are standing in long lines outside and other people (like me) are just walking right in the doors to approach the train platforms to the paucity of seating in the waiting area (I haven't used "paucity" for a while) to just about anything else you care to mention...

Anyway. And god help you if for some reason you want to get something from the McDonald's or Dunkin' Donuts counters (well, god help you in that case anyway), as you have to convince Security that you just want a french cruller and aren't trying to cut into the line of boy band fans that separates you from the counter. And since people lie to Secruity in order to do just that, it makes it all the harder.

And I miss "Area 51," which before they remodeled North Station was always there for me -- shoot them alien zombies -- whenever the functioning of the Green Line caused me to miss a train. I didn't have to take those trains so often in those days, of course.

Yesterday, my only entertainment during the 45-minute interval was to watch homely teenage girls carry around posterboard signs that said, "God made Coke / God made Pepsi / God made Justin oh so sexy" and to read the revised Mind's Eye Theatre "Laws of the Hunt," which fixes some old rules and confuses others and doesn't matter anyway as there will never, ever be an occasion for me to use it unless I run a game myself and anyway it seems the gaming group I know is splitting off into hostile camps (again) so good luck finding gamers even if I did.

But it has completely different rules for psychic Pyrokinesis and the sorcerous Path of Hellfire and the theurgic Via Ignis and they're not just rewrites of the thaumaturgical Lure of Flames or changeling Pyretics, and that's pretty impressive given that you'd think there are only so many ways to pretend to set things on fire magically by playing rock-paper-scissors.

Anyway, I hate the Fleet Center.

I'd add, "speaking of setting things on fire," but that would be irresponsible.