Dinner was a grilled Havarti cheese sandwich with a slice of tomato on it, buttermilk bread, in a pan with some bacon grease in it. It was delicious!
This evening was full of amusements -- this family of four from the western suburbs, nervously navigating the CTA. They asked me how to get back home, and I tried to help them, at least point them in the right direction. The wife was nervous, explained (repeatedly) how they had never taken the bus before and were more comfortable with driving everywhere, and didn't know how anybody could navigate the public transit system -- after trying to help them out, I pointed out the LED displays on the bus that indicate the streets being passed, and the robot voice that loudly announces whenever a stop is coming up. Not to be a smartass, mind you, but just told her that it used to be that those things weren't on the buses in the 90s, making navigating on them a lot harder than today. The CTA has made a lot of screwups over the years, but they've made their buses and trains so much more user-friendly -- with the robot voice announcing stops the way it does, a blind person can actually get where they need to go on them, which is a nice thing. Anyway, the family got where they needed to go, heading back to their tiny town (the woman said that a couple of times, too, almost apologetically, not that I held it against them -- kudos to them for venturing into the city at all).
Speaking of that, as I sat on the overcrowded bus, seated next to a nutball youngling who was tittering over his Blackberry (seriously, he was audibly cooing and hooting over it, and pulled an ultimate dick move on the bus -- namely, I got up to let a woman out, and the guy actually slid over two seats to take the window seat. Total breach of bus etiquette, since I was seated next to the gal who'd had the window seat -- I had "dibs!" And to make it worse, the guy actually got off a few stops later, so it was as gratuitous window-seat grab). Anyway, that aside, and the presence of the American Psycho lookalike on the ride home, I was reflecting on how much I enjoy the CTA -- each ride is a kind of adventure. You never know what you're going to get. Sure, there are regulars, but each ride is different (especially on the buses -- the El trains are more reliably familiar, although I did ride on an El in the 90s that caught fire, and we had to walk through the tunnels to get to the next stop, since we fled that train when it filled with smoke).
Anyway, each commute is its own kind of narrative, and I never get tired of it -- seeing who's on the bus, what they're doing, wondering what their stories are: families, execs, students, oldsters, divas, dowagers, goons, everything -- just an unending assortment of humanity in action and life.
I've commuted by car and by mass transit, and while the car is absolutely quicker (depending on where you're going, of course), it's also insulating and isolating. You're not really experiencing where you're driving -- you're just going from A to B, inoculated from the world around you. And that can be nice, for sure -- you have your own little solipsistic automotive world, there. You're master of your domain, right?
But I find when I take mass transit, getting there really is half the fun. I never complain about commutes because each commute offers up another slice of the city, a chance to talk to people, to watch and to listen, to experience, basically. It's a much more varied experience than an automotive commute, where the objective is very much on getting where you're going -- and when you're driving, you have to pay attention to what you're doing (at least I hope you are) -- and you can so easily miss details. As a passenger of mass transit, however, you don't have to worry about that, and can just people-watch. Sometimes the bus and/or train offers up great moments, surreal things, crazy stuff (one of my favorites was in the mid-90s, when this crazy guy got up and preached fire and brimstone to the El train occupants -- I mean, he was all blood and thunder. And I'm sitting there, watching him go, wondering why nobody else is reacting to it. And then I see some of the occupants do sign language to each other, expressions like "WTF is this guy talking about?" The train car had about 20 deaf passengers on it, and they got up and got off the train at the next stop, signing to one another. The would-be preacher was just floored by that, shaking his head, and he got off at the next stop, just pissed that his ad hoc sermon had literally fallen on deaf ears. I said to Exene, after he'd left: "The Lord works in mysterious ways!" I also said "Nobody's even going to believe we just saw that!" But that's what happens when you take mass transit -- you just see stuff. Humanity in all its incarnations.)
