Monday Morning

Snapshots from my Monday morning:

Howard El platform. Random homeless guy works the crowd, gladhanding the waiting passengers. As the train pulls in, he pulls out several full-size bags of Snyders pretzels and starts WHIPPING them at various inanimate objects--the billboards, the shelter walls, the train. The guy's got a decent throwing arm, judging from the WHAPs of the impact. Or maybe he's kicking the bags, not throwing them. As I board the train, I see one bag sail along the ground and fly onto the outside tracks.

Northbound Purple Line train. I am sitting in the last two-person frontward-facing seat, next to a completely innocuous woman who figures in this tale only as "the person I was sitting next to". In the seat across the aisle and just in front of me is this long-haired mid-40's rocker-lookin' guy, talking to a maybe-50 black man with dreads. (Now, I love dreads more than just about anything else in this world, but when you're 50? maybe not so much. Or maybe it was just this guy in particular. Whatever. Totally non-hot, is what I'm conveying here. Not that it mattered.) These two guys--both at least a good ten years older than me, let's remember--are, throughout this train ride. removing from their pockets and commenting at great length about their collections of Hot Wheels cars. I mean, these guys were DETAILED. They were talking about such-and-such a car had such-and-such a detail, but the ones that came after it had a different detail and blah blah fishcakes. For the WHOLE RIDE.

Same train, just in front of me: iPod guy. I personally would extract several of my molars by hand if I thought it would get me a iPod, but molars are cheap and iPods are...not. Anyway, this guy is serious: he has his little 'pod, but instead of the Standard White Earbeads, he's got the big whompin' Koss noise-cancelling headphones. "Noise-cancelling", however, apparently only covers the wearer of the headphones; I, sitting almost directly behind him, can clearly hear what he's listening to. Radiohead, I think, which...okay, cool, but not necessarily everyone else's cup of tea. Then the probably-Radiohead song ends, something else comes on, and this man CRANKS it. I mean, if I knew what the song was I could have sat there and sung along and not sounded any stupider than I sound whenever I sing (which is, admittedly, very stupid, but still.) The fairly-cute guy sitting next to Dreadlocks and Hot-Wheels--keep in mind he's now across the aisle and two seats up from iPod Blaster--looks up from his book at the sound, shakes his head, goes back to reading. (I pause in my mild contempt for iPod to drink in the fairly-cuteness of this other guy, who is so clearly-out-of-my-league-and-also-ten-years-younger that it sorta negates his hotness, in a practical sense. Because...never gonna happen.) iPod gets up and blasts his way off the train at Davis, trailing some undoubtedly-hip band noise behind him.

Eventually, I got here.

We won't talk about "here" today, except to say that it is, without question, the last place on earth I'd prefer to be.