The art of noticing

He’s an aberration in a sea of same faces.

Inside a jungle beard, a mouth moves – baby snake in grass. His feral eyes mushed in bags so wrinkly I wonder if I can guess his age by counting them, like growth rings of a tree.

Snake-mouth hisses into his phone: “I’ll be back there at 9. He can deal with me then. Listen, I can’t talk. Phone says my data’s almost up. There’s ‘sposed to be Wi-Fi in this train but the somsabitches around me are using it all I guess.”

He stink-eyes the whole train car, as if we’re all live-streaming “Doctor Zhivago” out of spite.

In mass casualty triage, we were taught rapid assessment – quickly tag victims based on condition – Green for ambulatory, Black for dead. I’d gauge most train passengers at 6 a.m. are somewhere between ambulatory and non-ambulatory; some can respond to verbal commands, others have trouble lifting their heads. Warming up my brain too is a little like trying to boil on the simmer setting.

In that way, this cranky guy was refreshing. Utah is courtesy-conscious, which I like, but there are days I wished I was in Chicago where I could yell “Fuck!” at the end of a train platform without anyone caring. A couple folks might glance, shrug it off as “Guy having a bad day” and look back at their phones.

Here, loud talking, much less loud cursing, is frowned upon. If you forget your inside voice, the recorded “Train Lady” even reminds you – the sweet disembodied voice I picture like a Sunday morning version of Melissa McCarthy, gently chiding: “Be considerate of others. This is a shared space. Keep conversations and audio low. Headphones are required.”

The angry man doesn’t hang up, as promised, and his volume continues to climb. Not a single one of my fellow Wi-Fi sapping somsabitches tells him to stuff his stupid snake mouth. Why? Because it ain’t Chicago. Utahns are do-goody, but non-confrontational. Being mindful here isn’t about presence, it’s about minding your business.

Don’t rock the boat in the sea of same faces.

A few people closest to the man clumsily rifle through their pockets for earbuds. I take mine off, ears perked. The most passive-aggressive one grabs his backpack and huffs off to the back of the train car. You tell ’em!

“How do these things always happen to you?” a friend once asked. “They don’t happen to you?” I wanted to say. “Really? Damn shame.”

She was either lying or oblivious because these world-enriching moments did happen to her. She just wasn’t paying attention.

Human beings are storytelling creatures, which requires noticing, and that appears to be under threat by – I don’t know what – our self-centric culture… the computer in our pockets?

And people, I believe, fall into two camps: Window seat or aisle.

From where I sit – the window seat – so much of life, my cosmically inconsequential, narrow slice of experience on this doomed space marble, is beautified by the art of noticing. Anecdotal moments give our days texture, from colleague quirks to the little dramas that inevitably unfold when you pack hundreds of strangers in a cramped metal container with shitty Wi-Fi.

It’s not easy being a window seat person in a world of aisle people. Truth is though, I’m sad for aisle seaters. I hope to never become so spoiled by the beauty that surrounds me that I stop facing out on the train, butt to the aisle, pickpocket’s dream.

Aisle seaters, to some extent, are the product of urban living. Nerd break: Studies show that constant exposure to strangers leads to us being less empathetic. The “boiling water” study, which seems a bit wicked, had people opposite each other stick their hands in near-boiling pots of water, not enough to scald, but enough to cause pain.

The people in the experiment with a stranger felt little empathy for their partner. When paired with a close friend, however, their own pain increased nearly four-fold, which relates to the additional emotional pain they experienced when seeing someone they love suffer.

I try resisting that hardening, but it’s happening. More on that in a later blog, as I wrestle with my feelings about Salt Lake City’s homeless.

So maybe it’s normalizing strangers, but aisle seat people navigate life in an aloof, insular way, snouts down, so captivated by the great big digital world in their pockets to notice the great world in the great big world. Reminds me of a Saturday Night Live bit (starts at 2:20). Kenan Thompson plays David Ortiz (“Big Papi”) discussing his post-baseball plans on Weekend Update. One of his many retirement projects is a new dating website called “Go Outside.” “D’you wanna meet some people? Go outside, and look around man, everywhere is people!”

From amusing to annoying, just some of the things aisle seaters miss:

• Teenagers groping each other behind wood sheds
• Kids shooting the train with imaginary bullets from plastic guns
• An old lady in her car, smiling and waving like we’re the prize float in the parade
• Guy hyper concentrating on an uncovered cake
• Everyone within SPLAT zone of said cake giving a wide berth
• Vertically-challenged Asian lady at ear-level of seated guy, blathering into her phone, not a foot from his ear
• This makes me a horrible person, but there’s an obnoxious blind lady with a service dog “Gilligan,” that I always feel sorry for. Gilligan looks at me with woeful eyes that say, “I didn’t pick her, she picked me, I swear.”

Before I ramble on any more, I should probably illustrate the route. This is dated, because I procrastinated writing this, but my 1 hour, 40-ish minute slog was…

Here’s a map.

Okay, so…
1. Roy. This is where I lived for five months with Sara. It’s worth reflecting that this the only time Roy will be number one in anything.

2. North Temple Bridge. This is where I first started getting off and transferring to TRAX before I realized that if I went one more station, I could avoid standing out in the cold for 10 minutes. It’s also the station I returned to after getting a Fitbit, when that extra 10 minutes proved valuable walking time.

3. Salt Lake Central. This is the more ghetto station (remembering that “Utah ghetto” is different than “ghetto” in any other place in America).

4. Greektown. This is actually pretty legit ghetto by all standards. The platform, where drug deals go down, is across the street from the homeless shelter. I have seen many things on that platform, but interestingly, not a single Greek.

5. Courthouse. This is one of the central hub stations, where I would transfer to the red line for the train to campus.

Now that you know the lay of the land, I’d be remiss not mentioning that another possible answer to the “How do these things happen to you?” question is, much to my chagrin, I’m blessed/cursed with, apparently, an approachable quality. To prove I’m not just making this up, today as of this writing I was browsing CDs at the city’s main library when a heavily tattoo’d Latino guy approached me.

“Want something that will blow your fucking mind?” he asked.
“Okay,” I said, because what else do you say?
“Mercenaries of Mega Metal,” – or something – he said. “Ripping guitars. Blow your fucking mind.” Then he flashed a gold-teethed grin and walked away.

I was browsing the classical music section.

He sought me out! To him, I was just another “music person” and he felt like sharing, and you know what, I’m glad to be that person. He may have been walking around all day with this burning desire to divulge his love of the Mighty Morphin Metalheads – or something. He got it off his chest and I got a little story to tell.

As for commuting, seeing these kind of characters becomes part of your routine. Friends is probably a stretch, but I think one or two might even miss me if I had a brain aneurism, at least for a couple days.

At Roy, there’s the frumpy woman in hospital scrubs, horrible bowl haircut and bright smile that hits me like warm whiskey on a cold morning. She carries a bag with a cartoon beaver that reads, “Well I’ll be dammed.” Every morning she sees me, she chirps, “Good morning!” I leave it at, “Morning” because I need a more information before making “good” a qualifier.

And every morning, a middle-aged man in a Carhart jacket walks his wife to the platform. He stands with her in any weather – huddled and shivering in the snow, hoisting an umbrella when it rains. He kisses her goodbye and leaves, and every evening, is there on the platform, waiting.

If it’s possible to love complete strangers, I think I love those two the most.

And… there are married couples who clearly hate each other – like venemous “Carol” and fat “Matt.” I don’t know their real names. While I’m not one for weight shaming, Matt is morbidly obese. I once weighed 70 pounds more than I do now (well 60, it’s been a bad few weeks), so I know Matt – because I am Matt – and recognize that overeating like that is a manifestation of stormy emotions. It’s noticeable too because obesity appears less prevalent in the west. While vaping is a western phenomenon, eating your feelings is not. Most morbidly obese Utahns, I’ve concluded, are holed up at Cracker Barrel.

Carol doesn’t much like herself either, and not just because her fake name is Carole. Carole complains about the ticket machine in Clearfield not accepting bills. She waves down the train host, a warm Jamaican woman who has my favorite “How are you?” answer: “Grateful,” she says. Meanwhile, ungrateful Carol bitches about her unappreciative daughter, the stubborn zipper on her coat and always the “piece of crap” train. The public transit out here is, for the record, a dream – clean, convenient, and woefully under-appreciated.

How often I wanted to take Carole and Matt aside and say, “Don’t mistake hating the same things as love.”

I know this blog is too long, so just one last train observation before wrapping up. In the year since my spiritual face-plant, or, positive spin: recalibration (sometimes a hard fall helps a person find balance), I’ve experienced a gradual unfreezing of feelings. In the midst of my face-plant, I started meditating, and since leaving that all behind, I’ve discovered that train time provides me the same quiet, unencumbered time I need to regain my composure.

I overhear a beleaguered mom with ornery kids say, “I never have a moment to myself,” and think, “Sucks for you.” I have nearly fours hours of “me” time every day to close my eyes, think, listen to music, podcast, write, cat nap. On lucky afternoons I even snag a seat on the sunny side and recharge my solar cells.

And I reflect on the funny people I see – or perhaps I should say – notice every day.

There’s a phrase I love at the end of every podcast of The Moth, the spoken word show that’s alternately poignant and a litany of pompous windbags telling over-rehearsed and, you can tell, oft-repeated cocktail party stories. The announcer ends by saying, “Wishing you a story-worthy week.”

What else could a person ask for? What better metric to measuring a well-lived life?

Wishing y’all a story-worthy week.
Go notice some stuff.