Slow Death

I was in the worst kind of fix the other night, That is to say that it felt like it at the time, but it was the sort of thing where perspective was hard to come by. This is what happened. I'd gotten the opportunity to be a guest writer on Top Story Weekly, of which I've written in the past. This was the second time for me, and it was even more special this time that I got to do it. The way it works is that you go to a pitch session to present your ideas. After some feedback, you develop some into sketches, some of which are picked to actually do after a read through. So this thing happened while I was headed to the pitch session.

Everything was fine as I left the house. I had my needed writing materials, the most precious of which were the ideas I had to present. I had left in enough time to get there- just enough time. The bus itinerary I'd worked out would get me there a few minutes before I needed to be there. Things started going awry quickly, though. The first bus was a bit late. It finally showed up just in time to still get me to the second bus in time. At least if it had not become even more late it would have been in time.

Pissed, Narrowly Missed

I had a close call on Metro the other day. I believe I was heading home from somewhere, although now that I try to grasp them, the details of it all prove elusive. The point is that I had gone down to the platform of a subway station (I believe in Hollywood), and sat down against one of the columns there. For a while, there had not been a ton of incidents with unruly people there, and I guess I got complacent about that, not that my attitude matters.

This guy staggers by and plops himself down right next to me. He was eating from some kind of to go box,which I have to point out you're not supposed to do there, but I'll let that slide since he was also committing the more serious offense of being drunk in public. I found myself struck with fear over what he might do. I have no way of knowing whether this man is prone to violence, but at the very least he could have rendered me uncomfortable with inebriated conversation for some time.

How To Handle A Vandal

A couple of friends and I were on the subway last night, bound for Hollywood. Suddenly we noticed that a kid was writing on the wall at the top of the car. When he was through, we saw that that he had cited the book of Leviticus and a particular passage, though he didn't quote it. He alluded to it though, confusingly saying something about not making tattoos on yourself and adding "I am Jehova". That's how he spelled Jehovah.

I was myself first annoyed by yet another person degrading and devaluing public space. I hate that. There's no place that is safe from mindless destruction. That seems to be the reason behind so much of it: no reason at all. It's hardly better when it's someone like this guy who has a pretty clear motivation. The city has little choice but to endlessly and futilely attempt to eradicate such damage, and that adds up to a lot of money that could pay for more trains and more train lines, not that vandals like this guy would appreciate the value of that for them.

Training A Camera On Who?

I saw something unusual on the subway last night. Maybe this already begins to sound like something you've read a thousand times from me alone, but there just is no end to the weird stuff that happens there. This time, there was something old and something new. I'll just take it in the order that it came. I was heading home from Top Story Weekly, the show I regularly submit news jokes to. This time I got four in.

I was feeling a mixture of the happiness from that achievement and the anxiety of having been in crowds of people as I descended into the subway station, where I saw signs warning of some kind of filming going on. That isn't the first time I've seem filming going on at such a place, but not like this. The signs purported to be a kind of waiver. If one didn't want to appear in whatever this was, the only recourse was to not use the train.

Two Incidents

You see some odd things riding public transportation. The more of them you see, the less remarkable they seem, but some things still move the needle. Those are some really unfortunate things, and I try to be careful who I bring them up to, because they're generally rare and hearing of them could turn people off taking public transportation. I don't mind mentioning them here, since I figure there's minimal risk of my moribund readership taking public transportation in the first place.

A couple of interesting things have happened in the last couple of days. On Sunday, I was coming home from a comedy theater. I'd gotten to hear a joke of mine in a show, and I'd attended a Christmas party. The night was capped off by a crazy guy sprawl out next to me on the floor of the subway station platform, incessantly flailing around and screaming until the next train finally came. I was glad he and I were not going the same way.

Named

Yesterday there were one or two incidents of a sort that are not so common for me, and with which I do find myself at a loss. Both concerned travel, in a way. The main one, given that it directly involved me (rather than me being an observer), occurred as I rode a bus on the way to an audition. I was fearful of low energy (and the somewhat tight pants I'd chosen to wear), so I resolved to stand rather than sit no matter what seating was available.

There's no really convenient place to stand on a bus, but there is a tiny bit of space near the rear door of your typical bus. The key thing is that you get yourself out of the way when people need to exit the bus. I like to think I do a fair job of that. One man did not. He shouted out something like "Hey, Mr. Headphones- come on!" I was Mr Headphones, I guess, and I wonder if he thought I couldn't hear or see him. Indeed I could do both.

Unwanted Ride

Something that will undoubtedly cast me in a negative light is my belief that I am sometimes, in accepting a ride home from a friend, doing them a favor rather than receiving one from them. Of course, I always appreciate the kindness and generosity shown to me by others, although I am all too often remiss in my responsibility of showing them how I appreciate it. I like to think that I turn out a thank you here and there.

I do get a bit embarrassed about being done favors by others. I really would just as soon manage things by myself whenever it is practical. I make a point of not asking for a ride unless it is extremely necessary or so easy for the person to give that it is as if they are not doing anything out of the ordinary at all. It is otherwise not at all worth the impact on my relationship with that person, or the entry in my mental ledger of "favors owed". There are many such entries.

Justice For All

I saw something that first angered me and then pleased me very much yesterday. It was on the subway, as you might reasonably guess, and it came right after something that just plain made me angry. The trains were running on a less frequent schedule yesterday evening, and I had no warning. I even checked the Twitter feed to see, and it said nothing of the kind, so I wound up being late to meet someone for an improv show we were doing.

It was with the anger of being late and the anxiousness of going on stage soon that I took in something awfully annoying. There was this guy on a bicycle coming off the same train as me, and that doesn't bother me. I have a bike, I like riding it and I am fine with the good bike riders. This guy, however, thought it was a good idea to ride his bike through the station. After ascending to the second level from the platform, he was riding his bike the very short distance to the escalator which led to the street level.

Reading Nook

I had one of those public transit experiences that I don't love the other night. It wasn't that it didn't go as smoothly as it could, because it more or less did. It's just too bad that it couldn't go any better than it did. To begin with, I was going just a few miles away, but it happened to be in a bad spot. Had it been a few miles in one direction, that would have been easy, but it had to be a little bit north and then a little bit west. That effectively doubles the elapsed time of the trip.

The way home was somewhat trickier. I had to walk from my friend's house north, only I couldn't go straight north as the house lies by a dead end. I had to work my way around via a circuitous route which concluded at an intersection which was blessedly quiet. It happens to be someplace not unfamiliar with crime, and this was late at night. It was pretty dead, and I wasn't entirely sorry. The bus came quickly enough.

Surprise Talk

Yesterday I had a good night. I wrote a joke that appeared in a comedy show I really like, I saw lots of great sketch and improv comedy, I had some gratifying conversations that entailed compliments about my hair, and I got to hang out with a number of my friends. I could and should address those things, and maybe I'll get to it tomorrow. The thing that just has to get out is the drunk I met on the trip home from the comedy theater.

I saw him walking along the subway train platform, and I hoped to avoid him. He was lugging an open case of beer which I later saw seemed to contain a liquor bottle and a soda bottle (which was possibly all or mostly liquor). There was no question of him merely transporting anything, as I could smell it on his breath. I was afraid to shake his hand, but I have a bad way of not saying no when I really want to, and off we went.

Holding Position

There are small things that we do, I think that we privately take great pride in. Perhaps we recognize that they are not truly impressive in the sense that others would not see them in the same light that we do, and so maybe we don't tell others about these things, but we see them at the very least as mildly heroic deeds. George Carlin included such things in his act, calling it the small world. Perhaps much of what I write is in that category.

One of the little things that I do is on the subway. All year long, there are times when train cars may be crowded, but it is egregiously pronounced in summer, when tourists flock to town and seemingly eschew rental cars for LA's long-maligned public transportation system. Perhaps the word is out that it's better than it used to be, but I wish people from out of town didn't know. Anyway, the result is that seats are often unavailable.

A Story Of Three

I had an audition yesterday, and on the bus I saw something interesting (as I always seem to). It was all ordinary and fine until this little girl and what I presumed to be her older sister boarded. Even then it was unremarkable until the third member of their contingent- the one I took to be the mother- arrived. That's when things got good, although I could have stood for them to not be good considering what I had on my mind.

The mother was, I perceived, not a good mother. I admittedly came to that conclusion quickly, but that's a determination I'm always going to make quickly when a parent seems to do battle with their four year old offspring on equal terms. The little girl was rather precocious, and not entirely in the wrong. She declared early on that she'd lost her bag, and it developed that it had perhaps been lost in the area of a fruit vendor's stand.

The Jerks

A friend of mine and I were heading home on the subway from Hollywood. We had failed to gain admission to a sold-out improv show. It was relatively late by this point, and the trains running at that hour are invariably packed with interesting characters. This is not something I'm especially glad for. Interesting people tend to encroach on one's privacy in such close quarters. I would just as soon have a boring ride home myself.

My friend is like many people in that he is more social than I am. I'm capable of it to a point, but initiating conversation with strangers is outside my area of expertise. He thrives on things like that, it seems. As we waited for a train peculiarly slow in arriving, he struck up a conversation with a pair of women who turned out to have come from a Tom Petty concert. I guessed that one might be the other's daughter, but I don't know that, and how do you ask such a thing?

Some Kids

I saw something kind of interesting on the subway the other day. I was sitting near the end of the car meant for bicycles, but I don't believe there were any there. I was minding my own business, which is always when things happen to you. When you're getting in other people's business, nobody is and nobody can be getting into yours, but that's immaterial for the moment. Something happened, I saw it and I'll say what it was.

I was reading or some such thing, and I looked up for a moment, as I often to in order to maintain an awareness of my surroundings. That's very important on the subway, because you don't want to be taken advantage of. So I looked up and I saw a couple of kids roughhousing. I guessed that they might be brother and sister, and there they were aggressively grappling in the free space of the bicycle area. It was one of those eyes-widening moments.

The Birthday Boys

A curious thing happened on the train ride back from that evening of delights I described yesterday. Why should the return trip fail to be as eventful as the outbound one? This one was actually genuinely interesting, in that anyone would find it curious as opposed to just me. Now, by this time I had seen "The Great Gatsby" and bought two expensive drinks at a bar I had to wait in line to enter. Those are not things I choose to do, the movie excepted.

I had also met up with a friend who was in the area, and we headed home to our shared apartment building around 1am. Trains that late are either raucous party trains or they are trains right out of "Death Wish". This was the former, as we found ourselves right by some young guys celebrating a birthday. They were young enough to have a good time drinking Bud Lights, which signify not such a good time to me.

Bike Ride Day

Like I said yesterday, there was a big bike ride recently. It was Sunday, actually. Somehow I have managed to miss the big rides where they close down the streets and hordes of riders take over. I have been busy, not had a bike or felt too beat-up to handle the miles. Maybe it's not a string of coincidences. Maybe I have never really wanted to do it. I have a way of avoiding things when they are too popular for my liking.

In any event, it was this ride where everyone was going from downtown all the way out to the beach. That amounts to twenty miles. I think I have this right. Some friends did it, and I got their pictures. I heard their stories too. I do feel a bit sorry that I didn't get to participate, but I did get to indirectly experience the thing. You don't just ride your bike. You transport it across some distance via the trains, and I have done that.

Checked

I mainly try to do the right thing. I don't always even try, but I do try most of the time. Trying to do the right thing includes doing it when no one will notice whether you do or don't, because you're not doing it to stay out of trouble or to get some reward. You're doing it because it is the right thing. Most of the time, I think I manage to do the right thing in that way, but it's not always the case. I still rely on incentives sometimes.

It's hard to say how it is with public transit sometimes. You are going to have to pay in order to ride the bus, because the driver sees to that. It's considerably easier to get by without paying to ride the train in Los Angeles, but I pay anyway. That's partly because of how lousy it is to be a chronic scofflaw like that, but it also just doesn't pay to be one if you ask me. People do get cited for not riding, although God only knows how.

First Time In A Long Time

I had cause again to contemplate the nature of a very long bus ride the other day. I had business in Santa Monica, which is a very long way from where I live. By private car, it can be something like forty minutes. By public transit, it's between ninety minutes and two hours. Needless to say, that's an unpleasant amount of time to spend commuting, and that's just one way. Well, I had plenty to occupy myself.

This particular route had me on a very crowded bus, and so I had less opportunity to be productive than I might ordinarily. I will allow that I got a lot of podcast listening done over the course of four hours, but not much else. I would like to have gotten some writing done, but I just can't seem to manage that while standing for such a prolonged period of time. Who knows? I might be so wrapped up in an idea that I might get pick-pocketed.

Got Me Hot

There was this thing I saw that bugged me the other day. Now, I have a low threshold for annoyance. It doesn't take much with me, and that would be on a good day. On a bad day, things that don't bug me bug me anyway, but there are those things that are so firmly within the area of annoyance that it is irrelevant what sort of mood I am in. They put me in a bad mood anyway. Public transportation has a way of presenting me with such things.

What happened was that the other day, I was going someplace on the subway. It is typically the case that a crowd is exiting the station as I enter it, for I am getting on the very train they have exited. I enjoy the opportunity to ride the escalator down and watch the people going the other way. I also enjoy sweeping my gaze back and forth, taking in all of those who are there. This is out of curiosity and general situational awareness.

Looking On, Rather Wan

When it rains, it pours. After feeling like I had not been blessed with any remarkable public incidents to report on for some time, I had a couple in the space of a few hours. On this past Sunday, I had witnessed a seemingly drunken man and woman debating issues of dating and romance on a San Diego Amtrak train platform. Little did I guess then that there would be more to digest by the time I laid my head down to rest.

That train ride was more or less uneventful, but the same could not be said for the subway ride which took me across Los Angeles after the other train got me to town. Really, the subway train was mostly placid, but that stopped shortly before it reached the end of the line. I was listening to a comedy podcast, but raised voices started getting loud enough to pierce through that, and soon enough I had to take notice.