Last night, in an unheard-of coup following several bouteilles du vin, dear Sam and Lindsay almost convinced me to post the upshot of yesterday’s poetry break (which was of course a piece of my own). Well, in point of fact they did convince me to post it, around 1 am or so. And then this morning I promptly took it down again. I can’t compete with dear old Pablo and Philip, so count your blessings that I came to my senses.
Anyway.
The morning commute is an interesting thing. I can’t quite work out whether it’s so interesting to me because the things I notice are actually as odd as they seem, or if it’s just my half-awake state combined with the first jolts of caffeine hitting my system. You be the judge.
Last Friday, I got on the train and was immediately overwhelmed by the fabulous scent of Eau de Chien Mouille, more commonly known as Wet Puppy Surprise. I spent several stops trying to determine (a) whether it was making me nauseated enough to change seats, and (b) which of my neighboring passengers it was coming from, so that if I did change seats I wouldn’t actually be making a change for the worse. The woman in front of me was wearing a leather jacket. Leather, I happen to know, requires extensive steeping to acquire any sort of scent (aside from cigarette smoke, which it seems to absorb quite readily), so I tentatively discounted her, although her hair was sufficiently, um, neglected that I couldn’t rule her out completely. The guy behind me (back to back) was wearing a wool peacoat, which seemed to be a more likely culprit. What’s more, he had a baseball cap, and we all know that boys in baseball caps are 2.6 times more likely to own dogs. Or did I just make that up? Anyway, I tried to surreptitiously sniff said coat, but the odor was really too pervasive for me to get any sense of direction on it. Eventually, around Jefferson Park, I just got up and moved to the other end of the car.
And the scent wafted on, undiminished. I considered moving to another car, but with only two stops to go, it seemed more effort than it was worth in my undercaffeinated state. Then I started to wonder: is it me? How I could possibly smell like Wet Dog is beyond me, since I neither have a dog in the house (yet), nor have spent any time in the recent past rolling around in wet grass with one, but when the smell seemed to follow me off the train at Cumberland I got seriously worried. On my way up the escalator, sniffing at various parts of my sweater, I suddenly became aware of the people around me watching me compulsively smell myself. I guess that morning I was the odd one.
So this morning I got off the train at Cumberland as usual, hiked up the stairs and exited the turnstile, neatly sidestepping the a/x clad blonde with apparently no sense of other people’s existence, let alone personal space, and looked up to see a large-ish (15, maybe?) group of boy-children, ranging in age from, at a guess, 8 to 14 or so, all clad in identical dark blue tracksuits and jackets emblazoned with “UZBEKISTAN,” buying Chicago Visitor passes from the vend-o-mat and chatting with the CTA guard. Wrestling team? Gymnastics? What do you reckon?
Then, while walking across the concrete expanse toward the office building, my eye was caught by one of those obnoxious “I have an Honor Roll Student at [insert High School name here] High School” bumper stickers. Only then I noticed something else about it: the mascot reproduced on the left hand side. I recognized that mascot. It was a Norseman. My high school teams were the Norsemen. When I was 16, I was a Norseman, and that was my logo! My colors, too! It was identical. I found this inexplicably distressing, so when I got in I asked one of my coworkers if he knew what the deal was. “Yeah,” he said. “All the Bulldogs are the same, too.” I wondered about the business model – did someone own all the art to all of these and just market them to schools all across the country? “No,” he said, “I think the printers just have, like, clip art.” So my high school mascot, for whom we cheered and screamed and fought and – ok, well I really didn’t do much of that stuff outside of football and hockey games, but still. Clip art? How depressing.
Coming soon: Home Improvement Tips, brought to you by the Den of Iniquity.