The Day the Funny Juice Got Loose

NEW YORK - I caught the city in a philosophical mood today.

Maybe people were still feeling lightheaded after yesterday's mysterious gas smell floated around the five boroughs, but everyone kept spouting deep thoughts.

"We're all connected somehow," a window washer said in a thick Queens accent to a colleague on 23rd Street, working without gloves on a relatively mild January afternoon.

Significantly more dressed was the haggard crowd in front of the Russian consulate. A six-person wide queue stretched from the embassy door to the street corner 200 yards away. The faces of the line were dour: old babushkas hiding behind tattered handscarves, slightly younger men with jackets brought over from some Soviet Republic. These faces said: leave us alone; we're sitting in this line, suffering quietly and reflecting on our lives. Don't come near.

I decided to skip the line. Through the phone book I found Olga, Russian travel agent. She promised to get rid of my visa problem for $30, and offered some free advice to boot. Those old people were pensioners, applying for their annual stipend from Moscow. The consulate's closed for the first eight days of the year for Orthodox holidays, this was the first day they were open. The pensioners emerged from their tiny apartments in the outer boroughs to make sure the Kremlin coughed up their few extra rubles.

Olga shrugged. At least they were here in America, where grumbling thankfully is not a crime.

Dinner was at a Japanese tapas joint in Astor Place, Kekan, where diners can take a break from the soundtrack of 1960s J-pop hits in an enclosed smoking chimney. It's soundproof, so people can share secrets in plain sight without other diners catching on.

On the way back upstate, my train spent nearly a half-hour idling at the Harlem stop. A drunk man in the back of my car started yelling. "I take the train like twice a fuckin' year, and this happens once. What the fuck?"

Perhaps he didn't get the memo. Today, the city's thinking.