In many metropolitan areas, a strong infrastructure of public transportation exists; large buses, trains, and streetcars named Desire all work together to form an arterial system shuffling people from important place to important place. San Francisco has MUNI, New York has the NYCT, Springfield has the Monorail. The transport systems themselves move passengers from all walks of life, of all ages, races and — most importantly to the title of this “article” — of questionable sanity.
Why is it that the craziest people always have somewhere to be? Is the movement soothing? Are mental health medications secretly dispensed by the ticket counters? Has an anti-mental health institution confused them by implying that sanity is contagious, teaching them to find the most crowded places to occupy? Or is it similar to putting Air Marshals on Airlines in that passengers are afraid act up for fear of prodding the sleeping bear (possibly a sleeping person in a bear suit who refers to himself as a sleeping bear in a person suit); the presence of one looney dictates the sanity of those around them. Put fifty people in a box with one person who is a connoisseur of sock-tasting and it’s likely no one else will be bothersome. If you’re sitting next to a group of noisy, abrasive high-schoolers on their way to irritate some blood relatives for the next 40 years, get the attention of a man wearing a suspenders and ballet shoes to do a interpretive dance routine to a Schubert Sonata and see if the teenagers last through the first movement.
City transport infrastructure has created a distracting pastime allowing passengers to spend the rides solving the mystery of finding the craziest person. While it is frequently given away with visual self cues, nutters who brag of their fluency in Pigeon, Rat and Squirrel don’t always wear their madness on their sleeves. Though watching a person in the back of the bus shouting at their reflection in the window, arguing adamantly with themselves…and losing, is a dead giveaway. Secondary identification is usually noted by scent — the looser your connection with reality, the more peculiar your odor. It could be an evolutionary adaptation saying “Stay away or I won’t let you leave until I count all of the atoms in this bus.”
Though it is said that the best things in life are free, two dollars for 90 minutes of life-altering (and possibly threatening) entertainment is as close as anyone can get. Who knows if it will be your lucky day and an urban chef fresh from the twitch farm will share his spaghetti a la concrete with you? Maybe, just maybe you’ll be driven to take up a new occupation of rousing the “squares” who refuse to believe in perspiration as the ultimate deodorant.
Inspiration can be a mystery.
