To All Persons

I have to say I never liked cars and always preferred the metro. Even when I got my license and even bought a car — still preferred the metro. I'd happily prefer a bicycle if it weren't for St. Petersburg's climate, which actively nudges you toward the warm and dry underground. And all my life, hanging from a handrail in the morning, I had to stare at those idiotic "rules for metro use." And in almost 40 years of my life in Petersburg those rules never changed, not once it seems. And if you, dude, are forced to hang in the crush right across from those rules with no player on you — you're forced to read them. I must have read them several thousand times. And naturally I hate those rules with every fibre of my being, as they say, because it's violence against the brain. As a result I always desperately wanted to do exactly what they forbid, point by point.