I sat down this morning across from a young woman with a dreadful hair cut. It was a few moments before I noticed she kept rolling her eyes a lot staring vacantly out the window, and disagreeing with something. She shook her head no over and over, and returned it to this shameful down position. Then she started mouthing something to her reflection in the window. My curiosity was piqued. I did my best to lip read her mutterings that she was now adamantly opposed to. What I caught was, "NO! NO! I Can't. There are too many people on the bus." I felt bad that whatever she was hallucinating wasn't happy. I mean if your'e nuts why not have fun with it. I wished the voices she was hearing said things like, "Hey that's one snappy haircut." ,or, "I believe that tiny elephant should be wearing parka on a day like today."
Then to add to this surrealism, a herd of 4th graders boarded the bus. Adults were offering up their seats. The crazy girl smiled. From the back of the bus I overheard a boy child say, "If you turn that jump rope into a doughnut, or some other edible substance then I will eat it." I can only assume the girl child had previously said, "Eat my jump rope!"

While waiting for a bus a few weeks ago at Broadview station, an old man came up to me and started to talk. He put down his bag and began to converse with me and I sort of looked off and nodded once in a while. He wasn't threatening, just invading.

I thought "I'll be rude. I'm going to read my book." and I began.

He kept talking to me. He shoved his own book, a thick pamphlet that he wrote 25 years ago in front of me. He recited something from memory about love and I raised an eyebrow, nodded and looked at the bus schedule.

There were Ten Minutes until the next bus.

He showed me his photo from Ninteen-Fifty Whatever and he looked like a normal young man.

I looked at the floor and saw he was wearing a walking cast made out of plastic. His toes were dirty from the sidewalks outside, not grimy and he did not appear homeless. He began to fish for something in his bag and I noticed that we were drawing an audience of people who wouldn't normally make eye contact within the subway. People were as curious as I was about this man who just started to talk to me.

"You look like so and so from this Agatha Christie movie," he showed me a videotape and put it in my hands.

"Um.." I started and looked up to see a bus pulling into the station. It was not mine, or ours as I'd later find out.

"See?" he said. "You look like she does."

I looked at him like he was mad. "Sure." He took the video back and my bus pulled into the station. I thought I could escape, but he followed me onto the bus. He sat next to me and talked about Scarborough during the late 1970s (What went wrong out there?) and then he showed me his head.

His head looked normal until he took off his hat. He had no hair except for what was growing along his hairline. He also had four dents in his scalp.

"That's from when they operated on my head..." he said while pointing to the dents. "I got metal in there now."

I recoiled, the driver took note and drove a little faster.

I still didn't know this guy's name but he kept talking to me about a rail accident. He narrowed it down to the time and date of the impact when we approached my stop. I rang the bell at the last minute and he held me up at the stop because he wanted to shake my hand.

I got off the bus and dismissed him as one of those people who usually chat with the driver, only I got stuck with him instead.

Boy: I hate what gravity does to my body.
Girl: It does the same to mine.
Boy: Yeah but it works differently on guys now doesn't it.
Girl:
Boy:
Girl: Shit, I didn't know that.

I overheard this coming home on the Hamilton bus sometime in 1998. It was so strange I wrote it in my web diary thing. But don't worry, I kicked that habit long ago.

Two people talking on a train from Melbourne to Geelong in Australia:

(silence)

First guy: I don't like your face. I just realised - you are so ugly!

(pause)

Second guy: It runs in the family.

First guy: Nope, you were adopted.

(silence)

Every public transit system has its share of the local mentally ill population that rides around, seemingly all day, going nowhere in particular. If they're homeless, in addition to their illness, it may be for a warm place to spend the day in the winter, or a cool one in the summer.

They'll talk to themselves, other passengers, or even to the bus driver, about nearly anything. One particular individual that BT knows as "Jerry" spent a good 15 minutes on my Windsor Hills bus giving a half-intelligible dissertation on the Atlanta Crackers, the AAA farm team of the old Milwaukee Braves before their move to Atlanta (and subsequent relocation of the Crackers to become the Richmond Braves). Other days he'll just sit on the South Main bus and laugh loudly at anything crossing his mind.

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Another Blacksburg Transit observation...