A hot day in July.

It's hot and humid in New York, the air a heavy soup of sweat and steam. It's the kind of weather at least for me, when you'd be better off in your skivvies, sipping something blue or chartreuse and dangling your feet in the cool of sea.

Of course, this being New York, all that is impossible. This morning, like every morning, scores of people were galloping their way to work on every manner of conveyance--bus, bicycle, train, car, feet, skateboards and more. Damn the weather. Damn the sweat and stink. This is New York.

That said, the bus I take to work moves at more or less New York's average surface speed. The 3.78 miles distance from my home to the office I'm working in took the M31 a full hour to negotiate. If it weren't so sickly hot, it would likely be faster to walk.

I've always looked at bus rides with a Paul Simon set of lenses. "She said the man in the gabardine suit is a spy. I said, be careful, his bow tie is really a camera." But no one people-watches anymore. No one, it seems looks up from their phone or their pad.

If I were a Marxist, I'd bring some sort of dialectic to bear and talk about the alienation of modern man. And maybe our binary cocoon is evidence of that, evidence of a digital insularity that protects us from unwanted human contact.

That's pretty deep-dish, however, for a hot day in July.

And I've got work to do.