I have been trying to keep my bad mood to myself these past few days. I tend not to want to, like, inflict it on innocents. But obviously your mood colors your perception of things. I get in one like this, the world starts looking like something from a James Ensor or Otto Dix painting. Which is what it really does look like, I’m sure, only most the time I’m willing to overlook it.

Today it wasn’t quite as bad as all that, but it was still ridiculous. People looked like something out of a Dickens Materpiece Theater miniseries. Like from this latest one, Bleak House. They looked like they should have names like Dedlock and Bucket, Smallweed and Skimpole and Snagsby and Mrs. Pardiggle. I’d much rather they looked like characters from F. Scott Fitzgerald or Hemingway. You know, with names like Jake (everyone in Hemingway was named Jake) and Nick and Daisy. Instead you get Hortense there in those disturbing pea green leggings and Little Esther in her grubby uggs.

And on my way home, a genuine Bumble the Beadle sitting right across from me. I mean, I got on at Downtown Crossing, and there’s this rotund Level III on the other side of middle age with creepy seventies-style sex-offender glasses and a disarmingly windswept pompadour sitting across from me digging into a bag of popcorn, like he’s watching me like I’m a blue movie. Seriously.

I guess I’m as bad as the rest, when it comes to being looked at. Sometimes I like it, but sometimes I don’t. It depends on who’s looking, and how. I don’t know if every society and civilization has some taboo about looking. I mean, I think there’s probably some version of the evil eye in every culture, but the evil eye is about looking with envy at someone.

There’ve been a number of cases recently about looking. That seems to be the whole justification for the military’s DADT policy. Soldiers don’t want to be ogled in the showers, like ogling ever hurt anybody. The internet is another thing–there are people, like in the Big Brother reality show, who consent to be watched 24 hours a day, even by night-vision cameras. They seem to have embraced life in the panopticon.

But it’s the invisible audience that emboldens them. Unseen is the key. Can you imagine Big Brother (or any of these reality shows) with a live studio audience? It would defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it? Still, there are those for whom even an invisible audience is anathema.

Back in 2002, according to the New York Times, a federal judge in Chicago ordered a group of individuals and video companies to pay more than $500 million to 46 athletes who were filmed in college without their knowledge by cameras hidden in locker rooms and showers. The lawyer for the “victimized and embarrassed” (and now millionaire) athletes (who were, of course, granted anonymity by the courts) claimed that the tapes had been sold as pornography. “They clearly were trying to appeal to people watching these films for sexual satisfaction.” Each was to receive a cool eleven million— $10 million in punitive damages and $1 million in compensatory damages —for their trouble, which makes them all tied for the best-paid porn star in the history of porn.

And since the advent of the internet there have been numerous bans on camcorders at high school athletic functions, because, as one soccer mom explained a few years ago to the Guardian, video of their kids could end up on the internet, and some sicko could… well, you know, use it for private, untoward purrposes. The child and his or her parents may never know. Here the image is the victim. The image is our doppelgänger. But once unleashed on the internet, it’s on its own.

I just think it’s interesting, the power of looking.

And I was feeling it, with this creepy old Level III looking at me like in those old cartoons where someone’s starving and they look at someone else, who suddenly turns into a giant fried chicken leg, or a big ol’ T-bone steak or something. That’s what I felt like sitting there across from him. Like a giant slab of meat.

Which is why I’d just spent an hour in the gym. Which is the irony of it, I guess.