Thirty minutes into the evening rush hour, the weekend was already ruined. Some worry-wart dwelled for a moment on a speck of dust in the subway beneath Times Square, and in an instant a million dinners were ruined. On the Upper West Side a young wife snaps at her husband: "You know we were supposed to be at the Feinmans' by seven thirty. Where the hell were you?"

In the shiny, marbled lobby of a Yorkville low-rise, a doorman addresses a tenant - "Mrs. Black left for the Island without you, Sir; she said she'll see you at the club. The Toyota is in the garage."

In Harlem an exhausted father barks into a phone: "Where the hell you at, girl? All of us is hungry here. Get home now."

That was the scene this Friday night, as another subway anthrax scare held trains still for most of an hour, making mine and thousands of other commutes an exercise in futility. We'll never know the real cost of these mistakes -- sprinklings of sugar and salt and sand taken for spores of deathly anthrax. How many domestic disputes will erupt due to delayed arrivals? How many more arguments will spin off of these spats? It will be an endless spiral of lateness and discontent, the spark for serial infidelity, mass consumption of depressants, and enough channel-surfing to lay waste to ratings system once and for all.

Think of the poor fellow who just this morning made a commitment to himself to make the effort to be on time from now on: doomed. He starts out a half hour early, only to arrive later than usual. We are all very late, to be sure.

I am one of the lucky ones, with no one to meet and no appointments to make. I could afford to turn away from the first packed train that rolled into the station once the worry had passed. The scene inside was sickening, anyway: usually sullen faces were now more sullenly sullen than ever before. I hate to be redundant, but I'm making a point: New York is not a fun place to be at the moment.

The flood waters of Homeland fanaticism are rising, and we're already up to our necks in paranoids and neurotics. I would suggest that these timorous souls keep away from bakeries and cafes in the coming months. It's going to be a rough ride, and tough luck to be in that Soho bar tonight when a blissfully ignorant PR associate notices white dust on the back of the toilet.

Perhaps it's all due to some subconscious neurosis, like today's date. For those of us who put the day before the month, today was nine-eleven. I'd hazard a guess that most Europeans braced themselves this morning for news of some disaster that proved the date of the attack on New York had significance, and that the perpetrators know the metric system, too.

But folks don't dial 9-1-1 for emergencies in Europe, even though their trains are often delayed. As I exited my home subway station tonight, the Coast Guard helicopter rumbled overhead. The weekend is here but, in New York the tension remains.