A Child Of Atom

When I first moved to New York City the long alley in the Times Square subway station that connects 8th Ave and 7th Ave was still under renovation. For years it was a creepy concrete tube full of dust and dirt that never seemed to progress, and always smelled sorta funny. My friends and I referred to it as "Piss Alley."

Now Piss Alley is fully renovated, bright gleaming white with new tile and spanking new mosaic murals depicting revelers on New Year's Eve... but I still hate going through it.

Now the problem is an ever growing series of evangelists and missionaries who clutter the path both metaphorically and literally, handing out Chick Tracts and leaflets and nonsense trying to convince me that bar codes are the mark of the beast or that Obama is the anti-Christ. I cannot walk through there without getting seethingly mad. The capper is that you usually emerge from the tunnel only to find a table full of scientologists hawking their "stress tests." I guess emergence theory is at work, clustering these people together in the bottle neck of that hallway, but it is quite the gauntlet to run when you feel about them as I do... and another reason to avoid that alley.