It’s About Transit, Bitch

For a week now the Indignant Citizen has tried to write about something other than the White Sox. For a week he has failed. Yes, we have this war going on, with new revelations every day about how the Bush administration duped us into sending our sons and daughters to die in the desert.

So what the hell? While the Indignant Citizen keeps replaying the audio and video portions of the Sox World Series highlights—including Paulie’s slammer, Podsednik’s walk-off, Blum’s bullet and Uribe’s unspeakable glove work—we’ll let the West Side Critic work us back into the mix a little bit:

The planets must have misaligned, the sun must be skulking off to some black hole, because it’s just not right that the Seattle Seahawks have a good football team and the Chicago Bears do not.

Let The West Side Critic explain.

On Oct. 16, The West Side Critic, his Lovely and Brilliant Wife and Father-In-Law traveled to Qwest Field (Seahawks Stadium to those who rightly reject the vile, corporate-ass-kissing name) to watch the Seahawks battle the Houston Texans.

It wasn’t much of a battle. The Seahawks monkey-stomped the Texans 41-10, with running back Shaun Alexander running roughshod over every poor bastard sheathed in a blue-and-red jersey. You could say Alexander looked for holes to run through. You could also say he looked for opposing players to run over. He didn’t fuck around. No. 37 truly is a Tall Walking Bitch.

Anyway, sitting in the bleachers, munching on kettle corn, The West Side Critic couldn’t help but think of the current state of sports. The Seattle Seahawks are pretty good. The Chicago Bears kinda suck. The Seattle Mariners suck, too. But the Chicago White Sox won the World Series. Huh?!

At least the Chicago Bears have won a Super Bowl in the last goddamn half-century. Who doesn’t remember the 1985 Chicago Bears? The West Side Critic will never forget the Fridge, the Cro-Magnon looking QB McMahon and their teammates shaking like wounded animals as they “danced” to the Super Bowl shuffle.

What The West Side Critic means is, the Bears should have a good team—they should be dancing to the Super Bowl Shuffle II—the Seahawks shouldn’t be that good (they really never were until Mike Holmgren brought himself and his meaty mustache to town), the White Sox sure as hell shouldn’t have been in the Series and the Mariners shouldn’t suck so damn bad.

Instead, everything is in reverse. Something definitely is wrong with this picture. Next thing you know, Chicagoans will start making eye contact on the street and Seattleites will starting giving each other the ol’ fuck you very much.

OK. OK. The West Side Critic is aware of The Indignant Citizen’s love of the White Sox, and therefore honestly wished the team all the best. After all, the White Sox have Freddy Garcia, that go-all-the-way-nine-inning-killer pitcher and ex-Mariner. Really, The Astros can go fuck themselves. They’re from Texas. The West Side Critic wanted the White Sox to mess with Texas. The Seahawks did.

But The West Side Critic digresses. In fact, The West Side Critic has a completely different point to make that is only marginally connected to the sports rant unleashed several paragraphs ago.

Because what’s important is how The West Side Critic, his Lovely and Brilliant Wife and his Father-In-Law got to Seahawks Stadium. We didn’t drive. We took commuter rail, run by Sound Transit, Puget Sound’s three-county behemoth of a transit agency that’s trying to run light rail, commuter trains and express buses all over urbanized Puget Sound’s ass.

Anyway, it was a pleasant trip on Sounder, the name of the train. Cushy seats. No traffic congestion. No road rage. No sea of brake lights braking. No furrowed brows. No fidgeting with the radio station to find something to distract from the clusterfuck ahead.

Smooth sailing, really. $8 roundtrip. Still, Sound Transit has its problems. It’s gone over budget in its early days and reneged on its promises. It’s supposed to run nine daily roundtrips of Sounder, from Tacoma to Seattle with several stops in between.

It runs four roundtrips. Weekdays, with weekend service for sports events like the Seahawks and Mariners. The agency says it’s going to get to nine daily roundtrips ASAP. It says it’s trying to clean up its act. We’ll see. For all of you outside the West Side (everything west of Chicago, that is), you can take all of this as the West Coast’s way of trying to do high-speed, efficient transit and kind of coming at it slowly, somewhat ineptly. It’s tough. We sprawled a lot in the early days. We like our cars.

But we also like our natural environment. We like our trees. We like alternatives, options, choices. That includes transportation. We’ll see how it goes. Certainly, energy prices seem to be conspiring to force us to rethink our way of life. A good, efficient, cost-effective passenger rail system – if we can ever truly get one in Puget Sound – would be a good thing.

Certainly, it would be far more useful than a quick, pleasant way to get to a ball game.

Peace, out.
West Side Critic