Things I learned on the bus today

It's nice to fall asleep on the bus ride home. There's no need to worry about missing your stop, because everybody gets off at Forest Hills. You can read your book until you get too tired/nauseated to keep reading (which usually happens around the Dedham Mall, halfway through the trip from Norwood to Jamaica Plain), and just close your eyes and drift off. Lean your head against the glass. But be careful! Because it turns out that when you really fall asleep, your head will flop dramatically, loudly and painfully thwacking whatever hard object happens to be in it's trajectory. And if that object happens to be the emergency window opening handle... Let's just say that you won't be dozing too much for the remainder of the commute.
I ride the subway for one stop to get from the Forest Hills bus station to the Green St. stop, near which one can find my house. The train stops at Forest Hills and turns around. Everybody gets off, the doors open and close and open and close and the train goes in the opposite direction beeping and rumbling, like mechanical Ouroboros eating it's own tail or some sort of Moebius strip. Today there was a man, a poor crumpled man with a cane folded over on the seat after everybody else had cleared out of the train. The conductor (apparently notified of the man's presence) was trying to get him off of the train. The man smelled of alchohol and was incoherent; another passenger had to assist the conductor in getting him off the train. The passenger smiled at me when he got back in the car. "Life," he said, "I guess he wasn't always like that."
I watched the movie Capote this weekend. The thing that was most striking about Truman Capote, at least in the movie, was his absolute selfishness. He would say any lie to anybody for the sake of him or his book. He seemed incapable of casting anything in his life in a different light other than that which emanated from him and for him. His lack of compassion was startling, dealing as he was with inmates condemned to death, prisoners who had no clear idea of why they'd committed their crime.
I feel the same selfishness. I saw this man on the train, and was struck because the only thing I could think to do to help the situation at all was to help move this man to a cold bench outside in the T station. And I didn't even help with that. I watched. I have no idea what put that man in that situation, but I knew that something could be done, that I could do something to help it. Standing there carrying thousands of dollars worth of electronic gadgetry, the picture of privelage, and I can't even conceive of how I'd help somebody so far out of the light I cast.
A subway worker was cleaning the railings on the escalator stairs as I walked out of the train, one stop and one world later. He stood in the middle of the escalator, walking down as the treads moved up, not moving in real space, wiping the railing clean with his rag. It's a minor magical force that allows scenes like this to happen. If I had his job, cleaning the escalator railing would likely be my favorite part of the day.