Wednesday, November 8, 2006

Tales from the #66

They say you shouldn’t take your work home with you but no one’s ever mentioned that maybe one should avoid taking work back to work. This morning, on the sacred #66, I was trying to mind my own business, knit a little, and absolutey forget the previous day’s 15+ hours I spent toiling in the fields of the Democratic process on my video gig. No Go, my fellow Citizen.

Even though I was face first in the last rows of my project, trying to be completely apathetic, I could not hide from the election I worked at the night before. Some guy’s loud and slurpy remarks about the candiates kept pinging through the air and out of the corner of my eye I saw bare legs ending in dirty sloppy socks in running shoes. Following up the limbs I was rewarded with one of my pettest of peeves, a middle-aged guy in too-long bermudas – wearing them to the office in a fugged attempt to grab some pitiful last fumes of skater boi chic before we all noticed his birth date and sent him home to get a note from his mother. Yes, my Fellow Citizen. Guys over 30 who dress like this ALL live with their mothers.

In one hand, which was marked by felt ink with the numbers 1333, he clutched a clear plastic bag, which coincidentally had a label which read “Holding MCC 1333”. The other hand was trying to thread a belt through his short loops and he was weaving back and forth on the moving bus, all the while shouting out candidate’s names. A new bus voice answered him each time the name changed as if one had one chance and one chance only to be the Oracle who would answer the (clueless) Beltless One.

And even with extreme effort, the belt would not go through its loops and its owner would not shut the up.

Instead, belt dangling, he now pulled out a cell phone and called Bob. “Hey you’ll never guess what happened last night, Bob! I slept it off but you know that bouncer at BlahBlahClub that’s an off-duty cop? I punched him and he got me arrested. Who’s governor?”

And believe me when I say, and if you are a commuting sort, you will, that there was no where to run and you now stopped whatever you were doing and became a vacous sympathetic mouth breather. When you are late to work and trapped on a standing-room-only chariot of the godz, you do not question fate, you just stop, look and listen to your fellow human being go through their personal train wreck.

“Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha! Is he ever going to be surprised when I show up tonight in my uniform and arrest HIM HA Ha ha ha ha. What about Duckworth?”

And this is when, as shameful as it can be when you truly wonder why they took away the belt and didn’t throw away the key.