Went to see Yo-Yo Ma last night at Symphony Hall. There were actually three featured composers, but only one cello concerto (by Schumann), so Yo-Yo was there for that. Originally, he was to play a work for cello and orchestra by Osvaldo Golijov, written expressly for the BSO’s 125th Anniversary, but Golijov is having writer’s block, so we’ll have to wait until August for that. Schumann was sandwiched between György Ligeti’s Concert Românesc and Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben.

We sat in the student section way back in the back, and were treated to a lively and at times revelatory conversation before the show and during intermission by the two young ladies sitting right behind us. It seemed there was one who was rather worldly, while the other had never been out of the sorority house.

Before the concert the first one, reading Ligeti’s bio in the program, says to the second one: “Ohmigod, his dad, like, died in Auschwitz.” Her friend was like, “ich, what’s that?” The first, betraying no surprise at the question, answered matter-of-factly: “It’s, like, this big concentration camp.” The second one giggled, and sounding somewhat relieved said (I shit you not): “Oh, I thought it was, like, some disease.”

That was the grand-prize jaw-dropper. But there were plenty of other gems throughout the night. Second place: “Ich! Who’s Yo Ma-Ma?” (this was my friend’s favorite). And third: when the lights came up for intermission and people were getting up to stretch their legs, the chick turns to her friend and says: “Is it intermission?”

I don’t want to sound like a cunt, here, but (and here is your QOTD): am I wrong to think there should be a minimum of cultural literacy, particularly among our middle classes? Am I wrong to be appalled by this young woman’s obliviousness? I mean, it’s perfectly possible she was just rescued from a basement where she’s been locked in a box since birth. But if not, what does it say about us, about our society and culture, when someone can reach adulthood and the reaction they have to “Auschwitz” is “Gesundheit!”?

What a world, what a world! We’re doomed, WE’RE DOOMED!

Ever have one of those days when everything and everyone looks shabby and you just want to go somewhere spotless? Or is it just me? It can’t just be me.

Anyway, yesterday was such a day. Everyone on the train seemed to be an un- or under-employed and shabbily-dressed middle-aged beardo. There’s one guy like that I’ve seen a couple of times on my way into town from JFK who always sits at the front end of the first car, curled up in a corner seat scribbling in a notepad. I mean, he’s curled up in a fetal position practically. And this is a man in his late thirties, probably. Talk about age-inappropriate. Time to leave the womb already.

Of course, I have an instant dislike of anyone who puts their feet on the seats. It’s one of the most inconsiderate, offensive things you can do on the T, and God knows there are about a million inconsiderate, offensive things you can do on the T. I don’t get it, personally. And it seems like when someone does it, they sort of look around the car defiantly. Like, “yeah, I’ve got my muddy boots up on the seat. Whatchu gonna do about it?” It’s provoking behavior, isn’t it?

A couple summers ago I was on the orange line on my way in from Stony Brook, and there was a fat, mean-looking Latina sitting across from me and my roommate. And she was eating cherries out of a plastic Safeway bag, and throwing the pips on the floor, and each time she threw one on the floor she made sure to look up and give us the evil eye, like we were the ones acting like assholes. She was sort of daring us to say something, and clearly poised to retaliate should we decide to do so. I mean, who wants any of that?

But back to the beardo with the scribble pad. He was a little like that. He would look up from his scribble pad to see who had noticed his exquisite eccentricities. You can’t but stare at sods like this, is the unfortunate thing. And staring at them makes them think they’re worthy of attention. But it’s got nothing to do with merit. I mean, you ever see someone have an epileptic fit in public. People stop what they’re doing to observe the spectacle slack-jawed. They can’t help it. It’s the rubberneck gene.

And this guy was like a car wreck, somehow. I mean, he had that car-wreck aura. He’s one of those tiresome crazy people who knows he’s crazy. Kind of like Andrea Yates. I don’t know who’s crazier, people who know they’re nuts, or people who don’t. I think in some ways people who know they are have lapped those who don’t.

One thing is for sure: crazy people who know they’re crazy are more tiresome, because they want to draw everybody into it. I mean, if knowledge truly is power, you’d think knowing you’re crazy would empower you to, I dunno, take your meds or something. At least make an attempt to act normal. I mean, manage it somehow. but this sort of somewhat self-aware “hey, lookit how crazy I am!” shtick. Irritating. I mean, “look at me curled up on the T with my big, muddly clodhoppers on the seat scribbling in my notepad like a nut!” Well, bravo. How very original.

My idea of heaven is a sanitarium. I think of Prince Muishkin. I’ve always thought The Idiot had a happy ending. Off to the santiarium for an endless vacation. In Heaven everything is white, just as people imagine. There are no TVs, maybe off in the distance you can hear a radio, but all they play are accordian waltzes. The lamps are old fashioned. No skittering, nervous fluorescent lights. It’s summer, and gets dark late, and the lights are dimmed at night. They comfort you. There’s a big window, across from your bed, and an oak tree outside. There is a courtyard, and sometimes the nurse-angels wheel you out in the early afternoon, if you cleaned your plate at lunch, and you can feed the sparrows and the pigeons, talk to the squirrels, whatever. There’s an old gardener, who’s very kind. He’s the only one who sometimes you talk to, but he doesn’t expect you to say anything. He may ask you a question, like ‘lovely weather, eh?’ but you don’t have to answer. He’ll smile at you (in a nice way), and tell you a story, leaning on his spade, about when he was a boy. You love his stories. They never go on too long.

The beauty of it is, you can sleep just as long as you like, and nobody disturbs you, and even if you have a visitor, which you don’t often, you can close your eyes. You don’t have to talk to anyone, and you can listen or not, as you choose. No one expects you to understand them. And after a while you don’t. You never really did, you were just pretending to. Now you don’t have to. They make sounds like the birds, or some of them like the squirrels. Maybe they are speaking a different language. No matter. In the divine sanitarium you are taken care of. You don’t bother yourself about whence come your meals, or whether the nurses get a fair wage. Everything is white. Everything is clean. Everything is taken care of.

de·lu·sion: n., 1. The act or process of deluding. 2. The state of being deluded. 3. A false belief or opinion: labored under the delusion that success was at hand. 4. Psychiatry. A false belief strongly held in spite of invalidating evidence, especially as a symptom of mental illness.

de·men·tia: n., 1. Deterioration of intellectual faculties, such as memory, concentration, and judgment, resulting from an organic disease or a disorder of the brain. It is sometimes accompanied by emotional disturbance and personality changes. 2. Madness; insanity. See Synonyms at insanity.

For examples, see “Chex”’s comment here.

Now poor Chex is either (a) delusional and/or demented, or (b) employed by the MBTA’s online stealth-PR squad. You can usually tell the latter by their rosy outlook and lack of spelling skills (”turnstyle” is the tip-off here).

I mean, “La la la! Just be glad the Charlie machines/setup is just around the corner. La tee dah! Feed the machine a $10, ask for $2.50 fare, and get 7 dollar coins, 2 quarters, and a paper ticket for 2 rides. Loo la too doo! Roll it thru the turnstyle, and your done. Ta dah!”

What planet are YOU on? I gotta get me some of that crack you’re smoking, bro.

If the history of the MBTA is any indication, and it is, what automation will bring is a lot of broken-down machines and no one in the station to fix them and no one to turn to at all, ever. Not even someone in India to listen to your bitchin’ and moanin’. No one. That’s why they call it an automated system. Because no one is accountable. No one cares. Because no one’s there.

Remember, the Charlie card is not exactly a ticket. It’s basically a debit card. The machines dispensing the cards may initially be equipped with change, but that won’t last. The idea is that whatever you stick in gets added to the card. Period. You hang onto the card, and keep adding your fare. Will it add up in the end? Probably not. There’ll be nickles and dimes left over. Consider it a charitable donation to the Danny Grabauskas Retirement Fund!

The MBTA has stated that one of the goals of the Charlie card is to increase the number of riders who purchase prepaid monthly passes from the current 55% to 80%. And they will accomplish this using the aforementioned “reverse reward” system to discourage riders from purchasing one-trip tickets. Meaning, when you try to purchase a single-trip ticket from a Charlie machine, you will be reverse-rewarded with NO CHANGE. You will stand there for a minute feeling alone and dejected. Then you will scratch your head and say to yourself, hmm, maybe I should just get a Charlie card and load it up.

The limitless debit card is actually an improvement over the current system for people who like to have a pass for convenience’s sake, but don’t use the system as often as those who carry a monthly pass. But a simple debit system would work to the disadvantage of those who use the T more often and get a break by purchasing their monthly pass with unlimited rides. Hopefully this monthly pass, which, if you use it every day, amounts to a reduced fare, won’t be phased out the next time the MBTA feels the need to “think outside the box”. That’s how Danny Grabauskas characterized the bright idea of raising fares to $1.55. He said raising fares was “thinking outside the box”.

So, to “Chex” and his candy-ass rose-colored glasses-wearing pollyanna posse: take your Zyprexa. Come on back down to earth before you hurt yourself.

Poor Pollyanna! Hate to say I told ya so.

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.”

Last night at 10:03 I spotted this chick on the train from Harvard Square wearing flip-flops. December 30th and wearing flip-flops. People. I don’t know what to say. Should this person reproduce? There ought to be a law. You wonder what kind of positive reinforcement these people are getting, because they must be getting some from someone somewhere.

Sometimes I look at people like this and think, “they’re among us.” Maybe she just landed, or Scottie just beamed her down, or she just hatched out of her pod and she doesn’t understand that human beings with half a brain DON’T WEAR FLIP-FLOPS IN BOSTON AT THE END OF DECEMBER.

Yes, I saw it with my own eyes on my way home yesterday afternoon. The kid was with his sister and his papa. He was probably four, which is a little old for the oral phase. I mean, Freud said it begins at birth and lasts eight months. And the licking phase doesn’t kick in until adolescence.

Anyway, it’s funny what parenting does to you. You get totally desensitized. I mean, one thing kids do is condition you to choose your battles. Papa’s looking down at the kid licking the seatback and thinking, “well, it could be worse. He could be licking the floor, or the old woman next to him, or something.”

I went putt-putting with my brother and sister-in-law and their kids a while back. It was my nephew’s eighth birthday. He’s a handful, got ADHD and God knows what-all. So we’re eating pizza after our eighteen holes, or however many there are. By then he’s out of his mind, spinning so fast he can’t slow down. Everything becomes so immediate and urgent. He might as well be tripping.

The pizza’s fresh out of the oven, and you know what happens when you try to gobble it up when it’s piping hot like that. My nephew didn’t have the sense or simply the patience to blow on it, he just shoveled it in. Of course it burnt his tongue. So what’s he do? He spits it back out, onto the pizza we’re all eating. I mean, he was in too much of a hurry to bother with a plate of his own.

But not just once. The next bite was too hot, too, so he spit that one onto the pizza as well. And the next one. And no one seemed to even notice, or care. And that’s what happens after eight years of child-rearing. You’re like, “regurgitated pizza? Not a problem. Could be a lot worse.”

I didn’t see anything else of note on my journeys yesterday. This week’s commuter crowd seems very subdued, at least on my little route.

A NOTE TO MY GENTLE READERS: Before I begin, I have to admit something. I was waiting on a friend last night. We had dinner plans, but he wanted to go to the gym first. I thought, well, I’ll use the time to write my blog, and I did. And just as I was finishing–and this was the “Kublai Kahn” of blogs, I’m telling you–I hit something, dunno what, on the keyboard–must’ve been some combination of keys–and *poof* my IE window was gone! Vanished! Without a trace!

I’m no evil genius but I’m hardly computer illiterate. I just have big clumsy fingers, I guess. And while this rarely happens, whenever it does it’s always the masterpieces that go up in smoke. I wanted you to know that what follows is a pale, withered, anemic copy of the brilliant and spontaneous original. I feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day when he’s having that snowball fight for the umpteenth time, and trying to act all spontaneous. I thought you should know. I owe you that much.