Tozerboy

God, it’s hot here! One of my housemates is from Bangalore, India. When I first met him he said, “It’s a hot and chaotic place. One should never feel the need to visit there.” (You add the Hindi accent) So with the heat, the Summer tourists and the chaos of the Big Dig, I feel like I live in Bangalore on the Charles.

Everything is a mess here and we’re in Commuting Hell, otherwise known as the10th Circle of Hell, which makes everything Dante wrote about seem like a dip in a cool pond. Even without the latest disaster, the Big Dig had the roadways and the other commuting systems strained beyond belief. In the last few weeks the MBTA has been doing a major reworking and construction of some the Subway lines. They have also been opening and closing stations to update the way fares are collected. While I like the Charlie Card system, imposing it now, during the heavy tourist season just doesn’t make sense. Especially when you consider that most of us commuters want the people that know where they’re going to get out of way. So we have the added mystery of which stations take the new cards, with tourists in our way too. Now add the new problems with the Dig and the heat. What chaos

Whose fault is this? We can blame the contractors, Bechtel, it’s a pretty awful company (not to mention what they are up to in Iraq.) We can blame the sub-contactors. Those guys that make and haul concrete, you fill in the cliché here. We can blame penny pinching bureaucrats. I imagine ultimately, we all want to blame the politicians. Which ones though, this thing has been going on for so long, do we blame the Democrats or the Republicans. Its pitiful here in Boston, watching the pols on TV, all trying to take charge of the investigation or showing their plans to fix the mess. It is disgusting.

In the end it is our fault. Why? Because we are afraid of leadership. So until we quit electing/hiring pretty politicians with good haircuts that tell what we want to hear rather than what we should hear, I guess we should put on some shorts and leave for work thirty minutes early. It’s our sin, so we have to be punished

Did I mention that it’s hot as hell here?