On Transit

“I just saw a woman all dressed up and trying to look hot— get off the train, saunter over,...

Sat, 18 May 2013 10:00:54 -0700

“I just saw a woman all dressed up and trying to look hot— get off the train, saunter over, high heels, hips swaying—and try to walk up the down escalator. Totally made my night.”—From David. To be totally, totally fair … I have done this. Minus the heels and swagger.

A girl and a service dog in training. I think the dog’s...

Fri, 17 May 2013 15:40:00 -0700

A girl and a service dog in training. I think the dog’s going to flunk—it barrels onto the car straining at its leash, nose sweeping the carpet, tail high. It starts down the aisle and there’s some sort of entanglement, a swirl of bags, a yelp and a sharp word. When I file in a few seconds later the dog’s disappeared. I look for it near the girl’s seat and in the doorway at the other end of the car … were they with another person? Did I miss some sort of handoff? Huh.

Two stops later I reach for something in my bag and find the dog at my feet. Into its black and downcast eyes I project all sorts of remorse.

happy monday

Mon, 13 May 2013 10:58:00 -0700

Morning rush. At Montgomery, a wispy strawberry-blonde saws laboriously at a double bass. Right? One size up from a cello? Whatever it is, it’s substantially bigger than her and emitting miserable groans that to my untrained ear suggest the erratic death rattle of a whale—at best, a funeral dirge for the weekend. A BART employee mopping a spill nearby greets the musician as she pauses to flip through sheet music. “That’s a big one!” he says. “Sounds kinda scary!” She stares at him.

to the overthinkers

Fri, 10 May 2013 13:00:39 -0700

Sundress and leggings boards at 16th Street with a slouchy fellow in Converse. “Apparently it’s a hot topic,” he’s saying, “running for the train.”

“What does it matter?” Leggings sounds vaguely irritated. “If you want to run for the train, run for the train.”

“But everything matters.” He has the voice and face and slight smile of a very young Ira Glass.

They’re quiet for a while as she sips from a thermos etched with leaves. Then, “Yesterday I saw a man running down Mission with a baseball bat.”

“Yeah?”

“Literally running and screaming with a baseball bat. And, you know how I’ve been watching a lot of the Dalai Lama on YouTube? Well, this is exactly what he talks about. Like, most of the world’s problems are caused by too much emotion.”

“But,” he says again, “you could also say it was just the opposite.”

She glares from over the thermos. I want to give him a high-five.

It’s about five minutes between mom closing his fist...

Wed, 08 May 2013 12:58:53 -0700

It’s about five minutes between mom closing his fist around the dollar bill and him placing it into the case. He’s wide-eyed and wordless, but he gets it done.

New reader. Followed the link from Uptown Almanac a few weeks ago. I keep coming back to "Of Christmas Past" and it brings me to the verge of tears every time. [It probably doesn't help that I just got out of a very long-term relationship and am just generally a weepy mess anyway, but still.] You are an excellent writer; thanks for sharing.

Wed, 08 May 2013 12:35:45 -0700

It’s tacky as hell for me to post this, but I can’t figure out any way to answer anonymous mail except publicly and I did want to say thank you. I felt more self-conscious about that little Christmas thing than almost anything else I’ve ever written here, so your note was especially appreciated.

I wish you a speedy exit from the weepy phase—even if it is making you an especially generous reviewer.

The closest I can get to a story, to an excuse for taking this...

Thu, 02 May 2013 11:04:00 -0700

The closest I can get to a story, to an excuse for taking this picture, is to say that I’m going to an art museum tonight and considered, as I compared the curve of her spine to the slope of that top tube, that perhaps I needn’t bother.

(I’ll ghostwrite your love letters for a dollar a word. Is that tacky? Aesthete’s gotta eat, bruh.)

A family on the way from the airport, barricaded behind luggage...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 09:15:52 -0700

A family on the way from the airport, barricaded behind luggage marked with sew-on patches of the Chinese flag. At every stop, the little boy leaps from his mother’s lap, squeezes between the suitcases, and positions himself at the door with his camera ready. The chime sounds, he takes his photo, he returns to his seat. He says nothing. His face is grave.

I’m smiling; I love a serious child. Plus, the man in dreads is playing R. Kelly from his phone.

things I saw when I remembered I installed analytics

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 10:57:00 -0700

1) Search term: “tumblr strip club for older lady.” Hope you found what you were looking for?

2) A pickup by Uptown Almanac—an actual blog, which is totally glamorous to me. I’d like to say hello to new readers and also express some remorse for subjecting the Gently Scruffy Twenty-Something to wider ridicule. I swear it was just an observation.

3) Continuing click-throughs from OKCupid. Curious, because I long ago transitioned from enjoying the sociology experiment to, like, recoiling in defeat and horror from accumulated exposure to man’s inhumanity to man. I don’t have a profile up, is what I’m saying, so … ?

commuting at 5'4" is

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:26:53 -0700

Standing encircled by suits in earbuds, chin up, eyes narrow, trying furiously to determine which of these grown-ass men is the source of the “Call Me Maybe.”

Gently scruffy twenty-something has quit his job. A rundown of his plans, provided between West...

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 15:14:08 -0700

Gently scruffy twenty-something has quit his job. A rundown of his plans, provided between West Oakland and 19th Street stations, scores a perfect ten on the Gently Scruffy Twenty-Something Funemployment Checklist:

Start going to yoga (again)
Start brewing beer (again)
Start playing guitar (again)
Build up a touring bike
Finish the design for his tattoo
Visit friends in Brooklyn
Get a one-month internship (up to three months if it were “more of an apprenticeship in something, like, artisan”)
Travel for a little bit, probably South America
Learn Spanish (prior to traveling, “obviously; it’s not really worth going if you can’t understand any of the culture”)
Plant herbs (definitely) and vegetables (with landlord’s permission)

“I’m so proud of you for doing this,” says the girlfriend, Pattagucci and hiking boots. She adjusts her head on his shoulder to better accommodate one of two whimsical pigtails. “It’s so great that you’ve got, like, specific ideas for what you’re going to do.” Then, incredibly, “How did you even come up with all that stuff?”

I’ve been only half-listening—idling somewhere between mild interest and envy—but now I turn in an attempt to determine whether she’s being facetious. She’s tracing the lines on his palm with one hand and holding a bag of Four Barrel coffee in the other. It would appear not.

Photographing her videoing him drawing someone else. I’m...

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 11:06:52 -0700

Photographing her videoing him drawing someone else. I’m not blurring faces because I’d really love to meet these two—which of course I could have, right then, had I not been so slow to work out what they were doing. As it was, it didn’t click until I was halfway out the door: from where I was standing beforehand I couldn’t see the sketchbook, identify that round thing as a fig rig (Why’s that girl carrying a steering wheel?), or figure out why she was staring wordlessly over his shoulder with an SLR.

Oh well. The Internet gods did not bring me the bookworm or the off-duty EMT, but maybe one day it’ll turn up those sketches.

He’s reading The Game.

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:15:27 -0700

He’s reading The Game.

Living dangerously, utterly mundane edition

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 20:05:57 -0700

Maybe Boston related, maybe not, but there are police ev-er-y-where—in the station, on the platform, on the train. I suppose this is meant to remind us that we’re safe, but like most measures thus intended it has the opposite effect.

Anyway, here I go, under the bay with a few hundred strangers and their suspicious packages. La-dee-da.

I am very sorry

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 12:04:00 -0700

… if I made you late for work. It/I went down like this:

12th street: Man, it’s stuffy in here.
West Oakland: Think about something else. Isn’t it National Poetry month? Write a haiku. Here we go again / Interminable tunnel / Is it Friday yet?
Transbay: Shit. Maybe I should sit down.
Embarcadero: Oh, come on, princess. Suck it up for one more st—
Montgomery: WOMP

I came to on the floor to the sound of my own panicky bleating (awkward!) and the sight of 50 gawking strangers’ faces backlit by throbbing fluorescents. I will say—academically, no dramatics intended—that this was the most disorienting experience I’ve ever had. It took a full minute of high-rev hypothesizing (bike crash, car crash, train crash, bomb?) and the slow reassurance of a very nice lady in a cardigan to situate myself, at which point I was, you know, totally mortified.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” says the cop on the platform, filling out a form as I Decline Medical Treatment. “Happens all the time. Trains are crowded, heater’s going, all that recycled air. Or, you know, somebody skips breakfast, runs for a train, gets out of breath. Were you standing?”

“I stand on BART every day,” I protest. My inner athlete-wannabe is getting defensive. “I always stand.”

“Well, it happens all the time,” repeats the second cop. “Seriously, two or three times a morning. Usually in the tunnel.”

I’m curious about this. They tell me the Transbay swoon is phenomenon enough that there are paramedics stationed at West Oakland and Embarcadero during peak hours. This is very interesting, but in no way makes me feel like less of a dumbass.

>_<

INTERNET GODS: Please magically relay my gratitude to cardigan lady and the guy who helped me off the train. He was an EMT—how convenient—a Chris, I think? A pierced lip or ear or eyebrow? In any case: props for gallantry, for real.

TWO WOMEN WITH OPEN PALMS The older one peers down at the fruit...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 11:54:00 -0700

TWO WOMEN WITH OPEN PALMS

The older one peers down at the fruit in her hands from beneath a gray crown of flyaway hair. “Maybe they’re good to eat,” she says to her companion. “I should have taken a picture of the leaf.”

“I wonder what made me think it was a magnolia?” She’s picking up each fruit and putting it down again. “I suppose there’s one like it in front of the hospital.”

* * * * *

The one with a hula hoop is my age, Instagramming some rocks. I guess this is a thing? I move so I can read her caption. It’s, “<3 <3 <3”.

what we have here

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:04:00 -0700

Hey, yo, Jas, girl, what up?
I said, yo, Jas, girl, what up?
…
Girl!
Girl!
…
Me and you, we gonna talk FACE to FACE.
Me and you we, gonna talk FACE to FACE.
…
This stays between me and you, girl.
This stays between ME and YOU, girl.
This stays between YOU and ME!
…
What? What did you say?
What did you say?
What did you SAY?
…
We don’t need anybody up in our business!
We don’t need anybody up in our business!
I SAID, we don’t need a-ny-bod-y up in our business!
Our BUSINESS!
…
Me and you, girl.

—Man on the phone. And we’re a-aaall there with him.

tell them what they want to hear

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 12:23:51 -0700

A girl is studying from the Laney College workbook ESL for Customer Service. She’s arrived at “vocabulary for working with difficult customers”—words like accommodate, satisfaction, resolvable, and annoyance. The exercise asks her to list the noun, adjective, and verb forms, then mark with a smiley or frowny face whether the word family has negative or positive connotations.

The margins are heavy with the red ink of her translations, something Eastern European in neat, dense cursive. I want to plaster gold stars all over the page.

"I’m trying to remember if God ever, like, legitimately struck someone down for something like..."

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 09:50:00 -0700

“I’m trying to remember if God ever, like, legitimately struck someone down for something like working on the Sabbath. I feel like that kind of stuff is more like a suggestion, like, not what He wants but He’s not actually going to ding you for it.”

- Biblical misdemeanors go unpunished

Waiting at Montgomery. Just overheard “nuance” used as a verb.

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 21:12:37 -0700

Waiting at Montgomery. Just overheard “nuance” used as a verb.