[UTA] I'm a big fan of TRAX; it gets me to and from work with very little muss or fuss. The daytime passengers tend to be suitably grimfaced and disinterested, so personal-space violations are less common than I expected at first. Occasionally I get a story out of it, too, with which to bore my co-workers, who have begun encouraging me instead to take it out on the Salt Blog.
The Greaser and the Wasp
One time a really interesting-looking 70-year-old guy got on at the 900 East platform. With his pompadour, leather jacket and harness boots, he looked like he'd been a greaser in the 1950s and had kept the faith ever since, never letting go even in the face of plastic, derivative revivals during the 1970s and '80s, surviving day by day until, now, he looked really
cool again, and utterly authentic.
He sat down right in front of me, which I enjoyed because it meant I could admire his
DA during the remainder of my trip. Suddenly, I noticed a wasp crawling on his jacket ...
headed straight for the DA and the man's exposed neck! I didn't know what to do, so I said, "Pardon me, sir; there's a wasp on you." The man couldn't hear me because he was wearing earbuds (which many people find to be a good strategy for public transportation). I tapped him on the shoulder, tentatively so as not to anger the wasp, and repeated myself.
He looked at his watch and said, "It's 9:45."
"
No, sir," I said, slowly and distinctly. "You. have. a.
wasp. on. you!"
"Well, take it off
me," he said, logically. I felt a bit foolish, reflecting that this did
seem the most obvious course of action. Still, you don't want to be brushing wasps off strangers without permission, do you? It doesn't seem polite somehow, even though hardly anybody in their right mind wants a wasp on them.
(And how far can this rule of etiquette, if it is one, be carried? What if, instead of a wasp, it is a deadly brown recluse spider? Are you allowed to disable it without asking first? I know from
Indiana Jones-type movies that, any time you see a cobra preparing to strike some heedless victim, you can go right ahead and
shoot it, no questions asked.)
But, now that I had alerted the man, and he said, "Well, take it
off me," the wasp suddenly became
my problem.
"Well, take it off me," he said, logically. I felt a bit foolish, reflecting that this did seem the most obvious course of action.
I tried flapping my hand at it, the way you do with bugs that are actually afraid of humans, like flies and mosquitos. This never works with wasps. It only alerts the wasp to the fact that you are challenging it, upon which it turns to face you, warily sizing you up, eyes narrowed, one eyebrow cocked.
A wasp doesn't consider you much of a challenge until you demonstrate that you're brave enough to
touch it--which of course, most of us are loath to do. However, to avoid angering the wasp, you must also not seem like an attacker. Wasps can sense your thoughts and intentions, so you have to be sort of casual and offhand about it : "La la la--whoops! Oh, I see that, while flapping my hands about for an unrelated reason, I have just touched a wasp, even though I meant no harm by it. How do you like that?"
So, it's something of a delicate matter. In a wasp-on-a-guy's-jacket situation, you really have to sort of
wrangle it off. You steel your nerves, brush that wasp off the guy's jacket and suddenly there's an intense, adrenaline-shot moment when you
hear the wasp buzzing angrily and
feel its wings beating against the tips of your ring- and middle fingers and wonder if you've miscalculated and will accidentally
capture the wasp instead of dislodging it--or, gods forbid,
crush it between your fingers--and if the next sensation you feel will be its sharp, venomous sting.
But the wasp flew away sulkily and the man with the DA seemed utterly oblivious to the whole thing. I'm not sure what I expected him to say--"Well, what a helpful stranger you are, brushing that wasp off me like that! And
brave, too! There certainly aren't many people in the world as helpful and brave as you are! So, tell me: Do you like my DA?"--no, not
that, but
some offer of acknowledgment, surely.
But I wasn't disappointed, really. In a strange way, the omission was touching--his trust in me was so implicit that, as far as he was concerned, his involvement in the entire transaction ended once he said, "Well, take it
off me."
(Brandon Burt)
[Clemency] When rapper John Fortè was caught with 31 pounds of an exotic-sounding substance called "liquid cocaine," his only recourse was to call on his hip-ass friends in the music industry--friends like our very own mover and shaker Sen. Orrin Hatch, who you might remember from his hit John McCain single "He Flies Like an Eagle" or "That Old Bastard Glides Just Like an Eagle Does" or some bullshit like that. Also, such musicians as Carole King got onboard the Fortè bandwagon. Or was it Carly Simon? [Vid note: wait for it ...]
[
Yes, we've all been quite serious about the brouhaha between gay rights activists and Mormons in the wake of Proposition 8 passing in California. But every once in a while, one needs a bracing dose of politically-incorrect satire as a reminder that no one has a monopoly on sanctimony.
(Bill Frost)
