People on the subway the other month:

1) A (fat) (moustachioed) (white) guy in a baseball hat and in a union shirt saying "brother" to a(n older) (black) guy who says he's a poet with a book on Amazon, and they both have loud voices like "that guy," and then a (younger) (black) woman with a soft voice butts in and asks the (black) guy why doesn't he vote and protest both, not just protest and raise consciousness about the system.

Only, this goes on for well over twenty minutes until the (older) (black) guy finally gets off the train, and then the (fat) (moustachioed) (white) guy and the (younger) (black) woman start talking about the (older) (black) guy and what he had to say, repeating his weirdest comments to each other.

. . .

2) A (younger) (white) guy with a (thin) (light brown) moustache who looks kind of white trash-y and maybe homeless, and he says "n*gg*er" to his (young) (black) friend that he's talking with, only to have a (younger) (black) guy standing near him say he'll hit him if he ever says it again.

After the (younger) (black) guy gets off the train, the (younger) (white) guy observes that he shut up because that guy was crazy, not because he was tough, because someone who was tough would actually have gone off and just hit you, and not have said anything about it first.

"Who says 'I'm going to hit you'?", he was like, "No one."

. . .

3) A (young) (light-skinned black) woman with richly-coiffed curly hair under a knit cap runs through the train car doors as they're closing and runs all "WOMP!" into the plexiglass panel by me separating the door from the bench-seats on the subway car, and then she recovers and sits down and begins super intently staring at her phone as she sits across the car from me and a little to my right.

And, after like ten to fifteen minutes, she pulls out a cigarette pack and starts hitting it against her thigh to settle the tobacco, only she doesn't stop, and the light rapid thwacking sound keeps going on and on and on, for at least twenty minutes.

At one point, I see a(n older) (black) woman in a public transportation worker's uniform farther up the car turn around to look at what the sound is, and later a (well-dressed) (young) (black) woman who comes in and sits a few seats down from me asks what it is and we shake our heads, and then even later a (scrawny) (late middle-aged) (black) woman who came in and sat down across from me looks over and sees that and shakes her head, which breaks the ice and I start talking to her.

"I'm here from Louisiana," she was like.

"And that's saying something, if someone up here behaves so crazy that you take notice," I was like.

"Humph," she was like, not necessarily in disagreement, and then she said that she was visiting her daughter in college, which she does a lot, since she doesn't work anymore.