Metaphor for a Wednesday.

This morning I took one of my long and solitary walks around the Upper East Side. It had rained all night and a lot of people aren't working today, so the usual crush of New York traffic was absent. People were sleeping in this morning. So there were fewer people and fewer cars than usual.

I walked aimlessly with no electronic accoutrements--no mp3-player, no cellphone. Just me and the singular quietude of aloneness in the city.

On Madison, I climbed the start of Carnegie Hill between 86th Street and 87th. The shops weren't opened yet. Kids and their mothers weren't streaming for their exclusive schools. About the only activity was just ahead of me, two garbage men tossing black plastic bags of garbage into the back of their garbage truck.

As I drew closer I saw it was a big pile of garbage they were attacking. One of the garbage men was silent, the other was pissed as he approached the pile. "Look at all this bullshit," he cursed "look at all this shit."

Garbage men cursing the never-ending crush of garbage.