Blah-Blah-Blahg: Food For Nought

I feel like Walker Evans with heightened senses (think amplified fly buzzing, a keen awareness of miniscule sounds and movements like the hard swallows that accompany Adam's apple disturbances, clicking of pens, the feathery-butterfly sound of eyelashes touching, and quiet sipping of coffee) while observing folks during my daily commute. Here are some of Mr. Walker's photographs of his fellow commuters. Plus some of my thoughts about the types I've stumbled into, over, but (fortunately) never under while aboard the train.

There are those who shut their eyes tightly so they look like the puckered part of a citrus where the fruit meets the branch. These people usually rock back and forth subtly as if they were trying to sense the motion of the earth while aboard. In their heads, they recite angry, imaginary rosaries and open their eyes just in time to bumble off to their memorized destinations.

There are others who speak your language with "American" accents, but they don't sound like you. They talk like people who leave the TV on, even when they have no iintention of watching or being in the same room as the humming set. It's a comfort to them to busy themselves and nearby strangers with the soundtrack of the quotidian - cereal box words.

Then there are the suspicious coveters. They want whatever you got. These aren't always young, catty women spying another younger, cattier woman's newer designer purse or shoes either. Sometimes they are older foreigners with no carrot-stick incentive to take interest in other people's stuff. They're nondescript limbs attached at acute angles to empty and envious hearts that long for the gadget peeping out of someone's bag, the watch on the arm that is clutching a pole to steady a body that no one will remember.

My least favorite species of commuters are the ailers. I especially despise the sneaky ones who sit next to you or stand above you as you are seated, breathing normally without any visible accoutrements of the sickly. Then BAM like a fart in church, they hack up something mucilaginous, whip out a covert pocket-pack of tissues (or worse, a yellowed hanky) and continue to ooze their diseases through pores, orifices, and contaminated clothing which, by now, have taken on a scent (imagined or real) of the ill. They are the reason I wake up an hour earlier and wait around work reading many chapters before making my way home on a slightly less crowded train.