Well, you knew it was only a matter of time before the Rapturistas started praying for the bird flu. We all are, aren’t we? Secretly, I mean. (Check out Bob’s bird flu fantasy HERE.)

So we here at T-Rage, in conjunction with Back Bay Bob, have developed the sticker above to, in Bob’s words (not mine), “slap on these sadsacks schlubbing around everywhere, sucking up air. Something to indicate to infected birds who to dive-bomb first.”

What Bob means is: we hope Rapturistas will wear this badge with pride. It may even become a way for them to meet, date, and spread the deadly virus without having to resort to costly and inefficient internet services like adammeetsteve.com. It won’t be long before we hear inspirational stories from First-Wavers who found true love via avian influenza.

For others, some of them not Rapturistas at all (phlegm-spewing T-commuters who sneeze and cough without covering their pox-laden snot-holes, for example–a full list will be available soon at your local Bird Flu HQ) it will be a badge of shame. But that can’t be helped. It’s much too late for niceties: we are at war, people, and it is the End of Days.

We’re trying to get federal funding (from the Faith-based Initiatives till) to print up roughly 150 million stickers, as Doctor Tim LeHaye, author of the Left Behind series of books on the Rapture says we should not be surprised if “well over fifty percent” of the population of the US is raptured, possibly by avian influenza.

“Think about it,” he writes in his newsletter, Pre-Trib Perspectives (and, no, I am NOT making this shit up). “If 50 or more percent of the doctors, nurses, teachers, craftsmen and workers from all walks of life including military personnel from every branch of service were suddenly missing - that would be a devastating blow to the American economy and way of life. Into that leadership vacuum that the rapture may cause, the world would be vulnerable to domination by Germany and France, both socialist forms of government with weak leaders or a globalist organization that would propose equality of nations. A perfect setup for the Man of Sin to move in and take over.” Or the WOman of Sin (hint: initials HRC).

Some, like Reverend George Zeller, of the Middletown Bible Church, think Dr. LeHaye’s estimates are much too generous, pointing out that “it’s one thing to profess Christ and it’s quite another thing to possess Christ.” Reverend Zeller reminds us that “God is not saving the world.” God is grabbing up his favorites and then destroying the world.

Bird Flu is only the beginning of His glorious plan.

COINAGE & KARMA. I got a free ride yesterday from JFK and I still don’t know why, but I wasn’t gonna ask. The token lady was outside her little booth, standing at the open gate, and I had my dollar out to get my token, but I guess she didn’t want to go back into her little booth to get me one just then. I consider it karma for a wait I had a couple years ago on the orange line, for which I wrote an email to the MBTA to get my fare reimbursed, and was told to go fuck myself.

THE EYES HAVE IT. I have definitely noticed that now that we’re officially into Spring, people are perking up a little. There’s been more eye contact out there in the last few days than there’s been in the past six months put together. People are funny. It’s still tentative, sometimes slightly teasing, rather curious than cocky at this point.

I spent many years in Budapest, and people there always make eye contact, and often stare brazenly on the subway. The staring used to bug me, but you get used to it. The eye contact on the street always gave me something to think about, though. On the one hand, it gave every outing an air of possibility, because each little interaction was a tale of its own, pregnant with possibility–visions of romance and violence, fantasies of intrigue–where did she come from? Where is he going? Was that an invitation in her eyes? Was that a threat in his? That’s what I have always loved about city life–that’s what’s missing from the suburbs. Fact is, in the suburbs, even if you make eye contact it’s in a familiar and thoroughly domesticated setting, like the supermarket or the post office, or the drive-thru from the safety of your car–and lacks that primal frisson of connection—and that vertiginous moment of “right now, if I look again, everything could change. Right now if I don’t look away, everything will change.”

Returning to Boston, I found it bugged me that you’d be passing somebody on the street and you’d be looking at them and they’d be looking at you, but you’d get about to where they were in focus, and they’d shift their gaze to the sidewalk. This is before there was any possibility of making real eye contact, mind you. Of course, in primates, the sustained gaze is a sign of dominance, while avoidance is a submissive or deferential gesture.

But here it seemed a sort of wholesale conflict-avoidance. The fact that the potential interaction was aborted seemed also to argue that people you encounter on the streets of Boston, for the most part, feel that conflict is the most likely outcome of interaction, at least with strangers on the street. Which is not so surprising, seeing as Boston is a city with a population widely stratified along social and economic lines. There also seems to be a lot of self-segregating due to race, class, and age, which is not so unusual, either. I think there’s probably more eye contact amongst strangers in cities that are racially and economically less stratified, more homogeneous.

Of course, psychologists and sociologists have a lot to say about these things. Scientists at the University of Wisconsin –Madison studying autism found that “in autistic subjects, the amygdala — an emotion center in the brain associated with negative feelings — lights up to an abnormal extent during a direct gaze upon a non-threatening face.” It could be that Bostonians have hyperactive amygdalas. Only compulsory mass MRIs can tell us for sure.

In New York City, in the days after 9/11, some psychologists-about-town, and at least one journalist(“gawker” Alex Kuczynski) noticed something: “In acts described by psychologists and sociologists as subliminal bonding consistent with wartime, instead of averting gazes when a stranger stood close, many New Yorkers made eye contact. The cultural historian Neal Gabler, who walked Manhattan’s streets for three days after Tuesday’s attack, said that New Yorkers have always cultivated the blank face. “It is an immunity mechanism, an emotional tax that you pay when you live in New York City,” he said. “Now, people have left it behind and are looking at each other with a different kind of civility, looking for some kind of contact.”

Kuczynski quotes Dr. Gordon Bower, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, on the result of millions of years of evolution in facial expression: “We are now able to pass on an emotional contagion, where one sad person can through their body and facial language pass on sorrow and grief to hundreds of other people,” he said. “It is an empathic, imitative response that even little children have.” Indeed, eye contact is so elemental even newborns seek it out.

But, yes, there are real dangers—but mostly inconveniences—associated with eye contact. I can’t deny it. I remember when I lived in Portland, Oregon. There was this big pockmarked homeless Indian in my neighborhood. I was working nights and he used to hang out in a doorway on my way to the bus stop. He was usually three sheets to the wind by the time I was getting to work. He was always very aggressive, demanding money or cigarettes, and because of his usual state of inebriation and his formidable stature, I found him threatening. I crossed the street to avoid him when I could. Whenever he accosted me I flashed him a look and grunted something. But one night I decided to just ignore him completely. This is something a lot of people do with beggars and bums on a crowded city street, but the less crowded it is, the more likely you are to provoke more of a reaction by ignoring them than if you just go ahead and acknowledge them. This was definitely the case with the pockmarked Indian. He flew into a rage, cursing me, throwing an empty bottle, shouting “Hey! HEY! I said ‘HEY!’” Demanding I acknowledge him. I didn’t. I hurried off to the bus stop, and made a note to try a different route from then on out.

Since that unpleasant incident, however, I always make it a point to acknowledge beggars, but I still don’t give them money. For many of mendicants it’s kind of a “gotcha!” game. If they can catch your eye, even for an instant, you lose, and owe them a buck, or whatever. This may be because of the empathy that eye contact seems naturally to engender. But I’ve been on skid row myself and never resorted to begging, so I feel like my empathy for the situation they’re in does not preclude a certain lack of sympathy for the solution they seem to have come up with.

Another danger in the city is that it seems like it’s mostly crazy people who aggressively seek out eye contact. I passed a mischievous-looking guy near the Pru yesterday, and knew I was in for something if our eyes met (but probably even if they didn’t). All it took was a glance as he was passing, and he barked: “John Lennon! Imagine!” at me. I laughed, and without breaking my stride, shouted back: “Double Fantasy, baby!” and passed without incident. He shouted over his shoulder back at me: “You got a fat wallet!” But what he took for a wallet was actually my leather-bound Moleskine notebook, which I often keep in my back pocket.

IN OTHER WORLDS. Anyway, at JFK there were two Asian students, one looked like one of those happy fat Buddhas, talking with great enthusiasm about some computer role-playing game. The whole way to Park Street. You know how people who are really into that sort of thing are. I mean, they can bang on forever about the different characters, their morphology, and their magical qualities. And listening to them, you’d swear it was all very real.

At Broadway, it probably was, an interesting character got on. He looked like he was maybe a Vietnam Vet, wearing what looked almost like a sort of paramilitary uniform. He had on those strangely-fitted pants your school custodian used to wear, the ones that were made out of indestructible rayon. Sensible shoes. A black SWAT-like vest, with some sort of walkie-talkie-like devise attached that would issue bursts of static at fairly regular intervals, prompting him to minutely adjust the volume with controlled competence. He wore a black baseball cap with the emblem of the Dept. of Public Safety Texas Rangers on it, pulled down so low you could not see his eyes, and, in fact, his bearded face was completely obscured. He may have been wearing Unibomber shades, too. Still, I felt like he was on our side, somehow.

Watching him, I thought, aside from the fact that his trousers are too short, and are exposing his white and red-striped (but matching) tube socks, he’s in an absolutely airtight world of his own construction there. OK, to some extent we all are, but his was hermetically sealed, with its own set of signs and symbols intelligible to none but him.

Then, the next stop, a mother got on with four little boys, all around fivish, sixish, sevenish. I think three were hers, because they looked just like her. And they were all lovely. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Squirrely, but in a Beatrix Potter kind of way. The crazies shrank from them immediately, of course, but the boys themselves were so completely good-natured and innocent, they didn’t shrink back from the crazies.

You could tell riding the T was this big adventure for them. And they were bold explorers, watching the goings on with fearless, utterly unselfconscious, good-natured curiosity. And genuinely cute kids are few and far between, let me tell you. But all four of them were delightful.

10,000 JOANS.After the gym I dropped into the Boston Public Library. There’s an exhibition, 10,000 Joans, upstairs in the McKim Building through June 15th. The exhibition, consisting of Joan of Arc memorabilia I guess you’d call it, hints at something, but with no program, brochure, or guide accompanying it, and very little explanatory signage, you’re left to sort it out on your own. There are guided tours, and I’m interested enough in the subject matter to take time out for one. (The exhibition’s title is a bit misleading, though. The number of Joans on display is in the hundreds, not thousands. I think the ten thousand figure comes from the complete collection, impossible to display, obviously, all at once, in the gallery space available.)

Because, truly, the story of Jeanne d’Arc is such a compelling one on so many levels: religious, yes, but cultural and political even more so. Americans don’t always get the deep, enduring significance of national saints in Europe. Sainte Jeanne is, of course, patron saint of France, and as such a symbol of French history and identity on some levels. Does the exhibition explore this? I couldn’t tell.

One thing the exhibition hints at is the incredible appeal and the richness of the material devoted to her story. Up to the present day. But here again, an exhibition of this size can’t even hope to scratch the surface. It did not include any reference to the French military’s helicopter Carrier that bears her name, Jacques Dror’s distinctive Art Nouveau-inflected church in Nice (that has been nicknamed “the meringue” by local critics), or depictions of her by cheeky French artists Pierre et Gilles. This is partly a limitation of an exhibition of an idiosyncratic private collection rather than a more systematic exploration of any certain theme. As a collection of artifacts it’s interesting enough, I guess.

One of my favorite books that takes Joan of Arc as its subject is Michel Tournier’s Gilles et Jeanne. By the way. In fact, I’d recommend about anything by Tournier for a good read.

My, but this has turned into some kind of lengthy discourse, hasn’t it? I will have to save my observations of my orange line journey home for another time. Until then, au revoir, mes petites grenouilles.

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.

First of all a big, big shout-out to Dani B., who was able to answer my burning question about why the doors on both sides of red line trains don’t open simultaneously at Park. And furthermore was able to do so without having to say something like, “but why do you care?” I just do.

The after the holidays funk has fallen like a hard fog on our fair burg. Have you noticed how down in the mouth everybody is out on the streets? It’s because everybody knows there’s no goodies for–what?–another four months, or something. I mean, when’s the next big holiday when you can go ape-shit at the mall and gorge yourself till you puke? (It’s just an observation, not a judgment, by the way. Don’t be so touchy!)

I’ve always thought it was better to have lots of little gifts all throughout the year than to blow your load at Christmas. But when you have kids you have to try to contain their bottomless greed and corral their endless wants. Again, an observation, not a judgment. Children have no choice but to be greedy. It’s how they survive. At least the ones who were the most greedy and cunning were the ones to survive in the ancestral environment, where resources were scarce and competition for them fierce. Every morsel that your little sister manages to get mom and dad to give her is a morsel stolen right out of your mouth. You’ve got to be cuter, smarter, faster, more brutal, or just pitch a fit whenever you don’t get what you want. That’s why they call it survival of the fittest, after all. Greed got us to where we are today, evolutionarily speaking.

But now, you know, you’re already in hock up to your eyeballs, and you dug yourself a little deeper in the hole, and all that crap you bought your kids, they’re over it. Onto the next new thing. Daddy, mommy, more! More! MOOOORRRRE!

You just have to look them square in their greedy little gimlet eyes and say, but Veruca, honey, there is NO MORE. Ah, but they know better. There is always more. That’s the one thing that there has to be!

But not until Easter, honey. Then we’ll buy you a stuffed bunny as big as you are and you can gorge on marshmallow chocolates until you spew! Now’s time to explain to them that it’s just like director Ang Lee said about his gay cowboy movie in a recent interview: “sadness lasts longer than happiness.” It’s best children learn that at an early age. It only takes a few minutes to scarf down ten lbs of chocolate bunnies, but the tummy ache will last you into next week, and then when finally you wake up without one, your siblings will have stolen all your candies, and there will be nothing left. But look on the bright side: Ol’ Whatsisface is Risen!

Yes, that old post-holiday funk. I’m immune, because I started taking my Saint John’s wort a month before the holidays, so I would be prepared. Nothing can touch me. But for those of you who don’t have any pills to pop, thank goodness there are so many helpful ads up all over the T! Feeling down in the dumps? Well, remember: “Philosophy works.” I love those ads. I was riding the T home one night last week, after a few too many pints, and feeling as lugubrious as I can nowadays, which isn’t really very, but I still have empathy. So it was after ten and everyone was kind of glaring into the middle distance. My eyes fell on that ad: “Who am I? What am I doing here? What am I meant to be doing? How can I be happy?” The School of Practical Philosophy will show you how! (Cults are the best way, I’ve found.)

If you’re too busy paying off your Christmas debt to join a cult, then you’ll just have to hunker down. Spring is only four or five months away!

Another riddle for Dani B. or anyone out there with special insight: you know those signs on the sliding doors of T cars that say “These doors do not reopen automatically”? What exactly are they implying with that?

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.”

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.