21 March 2007

sit on a train, reading a book

perhaps it's because i'm riding the train at off hours, but something was definitely up yesterday, or, as my mother would say "the crazies are out". i was almost entirely sure it was a full moon, but it tuns out it was just after a new moon. go figure...

on the way in i was Queen Elizabeth II. Only she was Greek. but she had it all, the hair, the glasses, the skirt and shoes.

but it was on the way home that things went haywire. i noticed a guy standing in front of the doors, holding up a sheet of paper and what looked like a trapper keeper folder. he was sort of oscillating, peeking through the three-inch gap between the two rectangles he held aloft.

of course, this is weird behavior, but nothing could've prepared me for the idiocy that was about to come out of this liberace-coifed lunatic. he starts telling everyone that the papers are a shield to protect him because he's a motherfucking angel. this prompted one of those rare moments on the subway when people actually make eye contact with each other. the people sitting in the group of seats next to me were all giggling at each other.

eventually, he gets around to the part where he invites women 29 & younger (whew, i barely make the cut!) to join him as an angel. women 30 and over, he said, were stuck as part of mankind. mankind is obsolete. i don't even know what the fuck that means. how are we obsolete when we're all sitting here on a subway train? anyway, i missed a great deal of this speech because i was wearing headphones, but it certainly added to the surreality of the whole experience that, peppering this total mental case's speech, was lou reed telling me "she's too busy sucking on my ding-dong".

a couple stops after gabriel got off the train, a guy comes through the car handing out xeroxed sheets of paper. on the paper, in very nice penmanship, is a note to the effect of: my name is so-and-so, i fell off a porch when i was a kid and now i suffer from epilepsy and seizures. from the years of 1952 to 1962 i was aspiring to be a successful dj. i am also a James Brown imitator. please help in any way you can... at the bottom, he's copied his driver's license and a business card for his james browning. i had a look at the license because after reading the note and looking at the guy, i thought he looked rather young to have been a dj in 1952. apparently, he was aspiring to be a dj at the tender age of three, as he was born in 1949. even the later end of his range, 1962, would have brought him in at 13-year-old aspiring dj. he was a little pushy. when he came to collect his pages, he gave everyone that "so you're really not going to give me money" look.

No comments: