For those of you that do not know. I use the public transit system here in Portland, Oregon. I use it pretty much to just get back and forth from home to college. That means that I get up extra early so I can at ride the Max for an hour to class and an hour back once classes are over. For the most part the Max is wonderful but the people that frequent it not always so much….Today I learned what the smell of death actually smelt like. It’s a strange mixture of moth balls, cat urine, and dust. I got this wonderful lesson today because an 80 year old woman took the seat next to mine on the train this morning. In a practically empty train she just happened to want to sit right next to me. No, she couldn’t sit in any of the other available seating which just happened to have more available seating next to it; it just had to be the seat right next to me. A practically fully empty section of the train and apparently the most inviting seat was the one next to mine.
Ok. So she wanted the seat. Maybe she just wanted to rub elbows with me. Maybe that seat actually had her name on it and I couldn’t be bothered enough to check it before sitting next to it. Maybe she just wanted to start early on the never ending battle for personal space that is public transportation. Or maybe the real reason is just that the book she was reading was so awesome to her she just had to share it right then and there.
Further along into our ride once the train was pretty packed and I was struggling to find something to stare at that wasn’t the person across from me, my eyes wondered onto her book. It was that at that moment that I realized that yet once again that in which has been seen cannot be unseen, but to expand that statement, that which has been thought cannot be unthought (take that Webster’s). The first line that I noticed on the page was, “it must be the sex talking”. Vomit… The leady of with the death stench was reading a romance novel. I am not sure which wanted to make me vomit more, the dusty cat urine covered moth balls, or the thought of if even this lady’s pipes still worked.
