Maybe someone out there can answer me this: on the red line at Park, why does it take so long for the doors to open onto the middle platform? Does it have to do with some antiquated system of pneumatic sliding doors? Is it a security feature of red line trains? I mean, both sides open at Park, but why should the one side consistently open first? Is it not possible for them to open simultaneously? It’s very important that I have an answer as soon as possible. I’m losing sleep.

Speaking of the middle platform of the red line at Park, yesterday’s commuters were treated to the soothing samba-inflected sounds of acoustic guitarist John Patton. The buskers on the middle platform there are usually pretty good, I have to say. Mr. Patton’s guitar is magic.

My green line adventures yesterday were kind of interesting somehow, I guess. There was a blond kid with a fauxhawk onboard, and a woman who looked like a muppet. She was wearing about fifteen different types of fake fur. Like, muppet fur. Her hair was done up kinda muppety, too, and then she had this scarf that looked like she’d gone and skinned Elmo and these gloves that looked to have been made from poor old Paddington Bear’s hide. Before I moved down the car, I heard her say breathlessly to her traveling companion: “she stripped down in front of everyone!”

Then I bumped into a woman who had this look on her face like she was smelling something really awful. And I mean, really awful—if she’d turned to me and rasped “I smell dead people!” it would not have surprised me in the least, let me tell you. But I think she just always looked that way, poor dear, because sniff as I might all around her, I could smell nothing amiss. And it wasn’t me, if that’s what some of you were thinking. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays are my bath days. And no one else was holding their nose or looking similarly stricken.

She was standing above a mother of two mischievous moppets. These boys were both perfectly lovely, and so was she in what looked to be her sort of Prozac haze. The boys both had mop-tops, which are coming back, apparently. Six year olds can carry it off. They were about that, and playing with this “20-questions” gadget. Somebody got Itchy one of those for Christmas. You’re supposed to think of a word and then the gadget asks you a bunch of questions (not limited to just twenty, unfortunately), and taunts you until it has guessed the word. But after you’ve done “poop” and “booger” and “boobies” and “butt” and so on, it gets a little old. I mean, give me one of those magic eight balls any day. (Although when I asked mine if I was cool, it said, rather too unequivocally for my taste: “my reply is no.”)

Later in the day I was meeting a friend at Harvard Square. I had a few minutes to kill and hung around the newsstand there, where I saw the most exquisitely bizarre magazine: Haute Doll (”for dolls who love to shop”). Inside were slick, Vogue-like photo-spreads of dolls in haute couture doing all the fabulous things real, live people in haute couture do. Not that I would know, but I can imagine. Very creepy is all I can say. Whatever the Haute Doll Agenda is it’s way scarier than anything commies, gays, feminazis, or whoever could dream up.

As for Harvard Square, I’m not a big fan of The Pit. But if you stand there long enough you sort of get sucked in, don’tcha? There was a schizophrenic doing laps around the newsstand. He kept going around and around, having a very animated argument with himself. There was a cubby bear yacking on his cell phone so all the world could hear. If there was any doubt he had just come down off of Brokeback Mountain, it was dispelled when he started shouting detailed directions into his cell to Christopher Street, where he promised whoever was on the other end would find not one, not two, but three piano bars. Eventually a friend of his came up and handed him a little packet of crack or crystal meth or something and he went away.

That was all on the lip of The Pit. In The Pit proper were four or five of those black-clad clichés that are always hanging out there, trying desperately to make a spectacle of themselves, alas, to little or no avail. Tolerance, an indisputable good, also breeds a certain amount of inanity, let’s call it. The greater the freedom we enjoy the greater the forbearance it requires. People understand this implicitly and go about their business, for the most part ignoring these walking cries for help.

I understand the impulse that motivates them, though. In our society there is nothing as reviled and revered—and can we have the one without the other?—as the outsider. But people are mistaken if they think that simply dressing funny, talking too loud in public, and laughing too hard at their own unfunny jokes makes them outsiders. What it makes them, of course, is smack in the mainstream. No matter how many clothespins you’ve pierced your cheek with, whether it’s a mohawk or a fauxhawk, and even if your underwear is made of Elmo fur, you’re just like the rest of us. Sorry.

Still, the Pit is a pit. And I can’t help reflecting, whenever I’m there observing its denizens, on these words of Yeats: “The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told.”