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the latest
waddle: good morning, wordpress - 10:36 a.m. , 2009-07-03 elaborate murder attempt - 2:56 p.m. , 2009-07-01 building a tractor in the basement - 10:42 a.m. , 2009-06-19 ask no questions tell just a few lies - 3:17 p.m. , 2009-06-09 my long lasting flavor really lasts long - 1:10 p.m. , 2009-06-04
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MY TIRELESS EFFORTS TO KEEP YOU SAFE ON PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION By mimi smartypants I'm on the train. (If you notice the time stamp on this entry, you will see that this is really not so.) (I don't know why I feel the need to ruin my narrative stylings with parenthetical explanations. It's a sickness.) Let's try again. I'm on the El, and it's early morning. Because I seem to have lost the ability to sleep past 4 am, I've been going to work quite early these days. I wake up, I can't get back to sleep, The Cat is being all snuggly and annoying, and finally I just slip out of bed and into my robe and spend the wee hours drinking tea and web surfing or reading, and then I start to feel like a loafer so I go to work. And I get to work on the El. So I'm on the El, practically at dawn, and there's this woman sleeping, quite heavily, like maybe she just got off a night shift or something. I'm reading, but I see a guy get on the train and sit behind her and slowly, painstakingly, start to try to reach around and open her purse. I try to verify this by watching him closely. Some other commuters are sitting there like lumps of dough, watching this scene play out. It starts to look like no one's going to say anything. (Shades of Kitty Genovese: the more people watching the worse it is.) I'm halfway down the El car but I lean forward, look right at him, and say, "Hey. What are you doing?" Note to would-be pickpocketers: work on the Face of Cool and Posture of Casualness. This guy could not have looked more guilty, straightening up, jerking his hand away, etc. "Nothing," he says. "It doesn't look like nothing," I say, in a meaningful tone. (I am a master of the meaningful tone.) He looks out the window and doesn't say anything. Now everyone's watching him. Next platform, he's out the door. Would-be victim never even wakes up. See, you don't need quasi-fascist paramilitary crimestopper organizations. You just need me. I don't know if it's all the transit excitement or just my contemplative mood, but I really want a cigarette. I quit years ago, and since then haven't really smoked a cigarette outside of a bar setting (and even that usually turns out to be a case of the idea being more satisfying than the execution), but right now I want a cigarette like a nun wants Jesus. The less-dramatic thing I saw from the El window today: one of those yuppie condos with a spiral staircase out back, and the third-floor occupants had decided to chuck their xmas tree out that way, and it had lodged pointy-side down in the spiral staircase like a waffle cone. It was kind of cool what a perfect fit that was. It's nice when the world behaves in a Lego-like fashion. ---mimi "like a taxi throbbing waiting" smartypants back/forward |
