But something drastically bad has happened. I think it might be a post-Covid phenomena. As my friend put it: "The people have fallen off." Yes. It's true. We had another werid, torturous experience on the train, it's now a frequent, pretty much every time kind of thing. Sort of excruciating.
Witnessing the unraveling of Human Beings: there is pain and sorrow in the watching, but also a visceral horror too. Folks who have fallen so far from making it. This time a very edgy, gnarly man started into a crazy monologue, something about being a "85% to 95% Virgin." Wow. I guess it's hard to be precise in the measuring? I didn't know it was a variable state. He also wanted everyone on the train-car to know that he didn't "rape anyone," especially no one "underage." A long rambling loop, a torrent of words, a very sick, deranged performance. It sounded like a torturous confession in reverse.
A broken brain. A damaged soul. A human being totally unwound, seemingly capable of pretty much anything. There was a palpable sense of danger, like bolts of electricity zinging and zapping in the air of the car. A fleeting shattering thought floated thru our heads: "Hope he isn't armed." We all are very aware that tragedy is often just being in the wrong place, at the wrong time. This all felt very, very wrong. The words of his rant poured out in an agressive, panicky, persistent, whiny and threatening voice, a voice of anger and pain. This man delivered it all right in front of us. An intimate private horrorshow. We did our best to not react. We exchanged glances, felt like we could read each other's minds, we told ourselves: "Be still, let's hope the storm passes." At a stop we jumped up, fled that car, and re-entered another car down the line.
Funny. On that car a long, thin, deranged & dark figure was pacing up down the aisle. Everyone was doing their best not to see him. A specter, a ghost, a druggie burn-out, not so much a human being as a stick-figure zombie, who knows, maybe it was meth, or crack, or some other terrible substance that was animating this hollow husk of a person? He too was rambling, chattering, making not quite human sounds. Sad, pathetic, a bit scary. We held on tight to the straps hanging overhead and counted down the stops until we could leave this rolling hellscape of human wreckage behind. Yikes.
Yes. "The people have fallen off." Seemingly untold numbers of them. It's truly a thing. Sad, but true. You know in America we don't talk about class very often. We live with this illusion that we can float across any class, but it's probably not true. Class is just a reality, the aquarium we all swim in. Some of us are born into it, locked in deep; some in luxury, some in plenty, and too much, some in barely enough, too little, just getting by, some in ugly squalor, so little, a life of scraping and lacking, and then some of us are just beyond it all, in total free-fall. There are the haves, the have nots, and the seriously lost and deeply warped & broken ones. Seems they all converge on public trans. Eye-opening, and sadly horrifying too.
