Kenmore Klowns

Ah, Kenmore Square: a bustling center of entertainment, shopping, dining, and culture. After living in Boston for the past three years, I've also noticed something else about this most popular of squares. There exists a breed that is indigenous only to the Kenmore Square area. These specimens are like some rare breed of bacteria that can only be found on the underside of a platypus' duck-bill. That bacteria on the platypus, however, aren't wearing backwards Red Sox caps and "Jeter Swallows" t-shirts. Who are these oft-intoxicated lurkers of Landsdowne? They're Kenmore Klowns.

Before I continue with this post, I need to make something clear. I like Red Sox fans. Most of my best friends are Red Sox fans. What I am about to discuss has nothing to do with fans of the Red Sox or the actual Red Sox team itself, but more about an issue regarding their means of transportation to Fenway park.

Fenway Park is located in one of the most densely packed areas of Boston. Free parking is unheard of. Since most people that live outside of Boston aren't as keen on how to navigate around the city on foot, there leaves only one method of travel left: the T.

So it's game night. I'm trying to get on the T at Boylston. Or Arlington. Or Copley. Or Hines. My destination is far outbound on the B line. But when that first B train squeaks to a stop, what is the first thing I see? A packed train full of Red Sox fans. People are crushed into the train like sardines. A man's faced is flattened against the window of the train's door, barely able to breathe. People struggle to reach for the nearest bar to hang onto. I look at their eyes and they all give me the same nonverbal message: "This train is full. Go away."

So, I'm left waiting for train after train after train until finally there's one that has slightly more space for me to enter. What annoys me most is that these people don't care what train they're getting on. They all get on at park street, get on any non-E train, and go. They could care less that it's a B, C, or D train. But for citizens of Boston like myself who work, eat, and sleep in this city as permanent citizens, it does matter. A lot. And we're left to wait for our trains so we can go to our post-Kenmore locations.

Now, I know that there are plenty of hardworking citizens of Boston who live in the Kenmore area. I feel your pain. I cannot imagine how annoying it must be to spend the entire summer trekking through huge crowds just to get home and take a hot shower. It's not the citizens that I'm annoyed with: it's the tourists, the red sox crowds, the out-of-towners that congest the trains and prevent real citizens from boarding.

But it's not as if I want to relocate Fenway park to free up more space on the trains. I love Fenway right where it is. So I propose a revolutionary idea. First, there should be silver-line size buses that continually go express from Park Street to Kenmore on game days. This will allow more room on the trains for citizens who require a trip longer than just to Kenmore.

Second, there should be certain trains underground that are allotted only for Park Street through Kenmore transportation. These trains would be for people who know that they are going to Kenmore and not further. Then, the rest of the trains would all go express from Park Street to the first above-ground stop on each respective line. That way, long-distance commuters who live near stops at above-ground locations (the majority of MBTA users), won't be given the shaft.

In the end, it's all about sharing. This city doesn't belong to any one person or group in particular. But I think it is important that the MBTA address the fact that Fenway Park is far too popular of a New England destination to be accessed solely by our meager subway system.

See Something? Say Something.

That's what the annoying voice of MBTA General Manager Daniel Grabauskas says to me every time I'm waiting for the T at the Boylston T stop.

It's also what was printed on a bright orange pamphlet that was handed to me by a reflector-vest-clad T employee as I dragged my sorry carcass off the T. She handed this cautionary pamphlet to every passenger that didn't avoid her like a leper. Unlike the rest of the people who took the pamphlet, I did not just throw it onto our city's streets the moment I got out of eyeshot of the woman who handed it to me. No, I kept it. Why? Because I see something every day on the T. And I think you all know that I'm gonna say something.

Maybe I missed the point of the pamphlet. You see, its contents were all about reporting suspicious packages and bags to MBTA police. The pamphlet is meant to instill fear within the citizens of Boston. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm all about fear. I love it. I bask in it like a prancing sprite in the azure waters of a forest stream. But the problem is, I enjoy being fearful of things that are actually threatening me.

What is threatening me? Not bombs. Not chemical nerve agents. Not terrorists. Because who in their right mind would ever want to attack Boston? On the long list of terror targets by a long list of angry people throughout the world, I'd venture to say that Boston is last on the list.

However, there are a few things that actually do threaten my every day life. My American way of life. For starters, how about an estimated T fare increase to $1.55? That's an extra 30 cents to add to my growing list of economic burdens. Call me stingy, but that 30 cents could probably go towards many more fruitful endeavors such as going downtown to buy crack in downtown crossing. Or...maybe I should just stop buying crack.

The point is, I'm mad. Less about the actual money that I'm going to have to shell out than about how annoying it is to find a nickel to pay for T fare. Usually I'm averse to change. By change I mean actual coins in my pocket; not a deep rooted personal and psychological metamorphosis that a man willingly accepts in certain points in his life at the realization of his own mortality. I'm all for that.

No self respecting man carries nickels on his person at any point in his day. Quarters are essential. We all know that. Dimes...I'm indifferent to. But Nickels? They're so arbitrary. And pennies are also great because when a homeless person asks you for change, you can reach into your pocket and, although you do have many quarters, you can pretend to fish around for a bit, pull out a penny, feign regret, drop it in his cup, and say "sorry that's all I have."

According to The Harvard Crimson, "MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo defended the increases as necessary, noting that the MBTA'’s fares are among the lowest in the country."

He may have a good point, but you know what? I don't care. I'm a Bostonian. I don't care what people do in Chicago, San Francisco, or New York. The only thing that matters is that I'm going to be slightly inconvenienced every single day. Maybe if the T's service wasn't so horrendous and its management was a bit more savvy, there wouldn't be an 8 billion dollar MBTA deficit. Just because they blew it why should the hard working Bostonian commuter have to pick up the pieces?

Oh, right. The pamphlet. I seem to have digressed a bit. I...hate pamphlets too.

Seat and Pole Hogs

We live in a society where seats on the T are so few and so coveted. Every day, we spend our weary commutes in constant search for the next place to rest our tired bones. So many people, so few seats. That's the bottom line. So why is it, then, that there still exists a breed of greedy people in Boston I have dubbed...The Seat and Pole Hogs.

Seat and Pole Hogs exist in the lowest rung of the ethical ladder. They are the people that exhibit more greed than Dick Cheney at an OPEC conference. They feed off the pain of others. They sip from the chalice of evil and savor every minute of it.

So what do these vile Seat and Pole Hogs do that would warrant my scorn?

First, I'll start with the Seat Hogs. They operate in a few different ways. One way is that they'll get on a T at the beginning of its route; for example: government center, lechmere, or conversely cleveland circle, boston college, etc. Basically they'll get on the T when it's empty, take one of the two seats at a "two-seater" and then put they're backpack/suitcase/shopping bag on the adjacent seat. Depending on far they're traveling on that line, they are barring other passengers from sitting down in that potentially empty seat. They're making a human being suffer just so they're H&M bag is comfy.

The second Seat Hog tactic occurs when the T is crowded. Everyone is standing up. A seat opens up, but then the person sitting next to the newly available seat immediately puts his belongings down to claim the empty seat. Same principle: does your backpack deserve the seat more than Grandpa O'Malley? I don't think so.

Observe figure A to the right: the green squares represent seats, the black dots represent normal, thoughtful passengers. The red dot is a Seat Hog! See, he has the gaul to put his nice little blue backpack next to him, preventing that nice young woman from getting a seat (Angry Standing Passenger).

The third way of Seat-Hogdom is slightly more subtle, more stealthy. Rather than putting a bag or possession in the adjacent seat, this person will spread his legs really wide apart so both of his knees encroach on the seats next to him. By doing this, any potential sitters feel awkward to sit down because they'd inevitably have to touch Mr. LegSpreader. Or, the person sitting will even be so bold to put one of their feet up on the adjacent seat and block it entirely! This isn't your buddy's rumpus room. You can't just "claim" seats by putting your poo-covered boot onto it.

There have been many times that my commute has been ruined by Seat Hogs. So what could be worse than the Seat Hog? The Pole Hog.

You usually witness the Pole Hog on those crowded early morning rushes on an inbound train. All the seats are taken. In fact, every inch of the train is taken. Those poor souls standing are forced to reach out for a pole like a 1920's New York newsboy reaching out at the bread-line for a scrap of sustenance. It's bad enough that you have to stand for 40 minutes straight on a crowded train at 8 in the morning. It's even worse when there's some douche who's hogging the entire pole.

The Pole Hog will often be some corporate clown who feels that he must read a newspaper on the ride to work. Since he'll need both hands free to read said paper, he'll lean his entire peacoat-adorned-back onto the whole length of the pole. By doing so, he blocks anyone else from grabbing it.

Why do people feel the need to prevent people from sitting next to them? Are people really that afraid of human contact? Are they that oblivious to how much it makes them look like an asshole?

Public Transportation and the Male Ego

I'm a guy. A pretty standard young male with all the pratfalls that are inherent in such a description: the messy apartment, living on 99 cent cans of generic brand beans, and not showering for days at a time. Well, maybe that one's just me.

My point is that I'm just as much your typical male as the next guy on the street. When it comes to public transportation habits, though, I'm vastly different.

For months now I've been noticing an odd habit shared amongst most males that ride on the green line. No it's not that guy who shrieks like a parrot every once and a while and it's not the habitual earwax spelunking that is undertaken. And no I'm also not talking about drunken meatheads going to Kenmore/Harvard Ave bars every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night; they've been around since the discovery of fire.

No, fellow riders, what I've been noticing is an exercise of the male ego.

I'm sure you've all noticed it before, or might perhaps be one yourself: an "unwilling seat-taker". Even I have fallen pray to the Dionysian lure of this habit. What does an unwilling seat-taker do, you might be asking? Well the answer is simple: he is unwilling to take a goddamn seat.

Sometimes, when a train is crowded and few seats open up it is understandable that a chivalrous man would prefer to surrender his comfort to a female, a child, or an elderly person. That's understandable and respectable. The unwilling seat-taker is the guy who refuses to take a seat even when the train yields ample seating for everyone. He will continue to stand uncomfortably even though he could sit down without compromising his gentlemanhood.

I've tried to analyze why some guys do this. I know its not that they prefer standing; after all, who prefers standing to sitting? No one. Its not for the exercise, because I probably burn just as many calories trying to comprehend how the Metro's writers have jobs.

I can only surmise that its for this reason: they think it makes them look weak and/or not a gentleman if they would rather sit than stand. It's the male ego coming into play again. In response to one of my posts earlier about "Chivalry on the T", one outraged reader commented that "I obviously wasn't raised corectly." I wondered why someone would be so angered by my post that they would make a personal attack on me. But I came to this conclusion:

Some males are so conditioned to surrender their own needs, wants, and desires to assist those that they feel are "weaker" or "less fortunate" than themselves that they are blind to the fact that sometimes they aren't helping anyone by being so chivalrous. Chivalry is a term implying the male's moral need to assist and be kind to a female because they are the "stronger" sex. It's a term that grew out of the middle-age's romanticized history and should not apply to our modern world where females are equal shareholders in the social stratum.

Men should act out of kindness and politeness; the earnest desire to help the people around them. They shouldn't act out of some macho preconceived notion that a man should never allow himself to sit even when there are plent of seats available. Common sense dictates that if there are 100 seats and 20 people, all 20 of those people could and should sit.

So I implore you, my fellow XY chromosomed compadres: take a seat. Make the world a happier place.

Pass the Purell Please!

Alright, I know I haven't posted anything in two months. I just needed some inspiration to break the dry spell and push me back to the keyboard. A couple weeks ago I found it....

* * *

Going to work on a cold winter morning is usually something that I don't look forward to doing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I speak for most people when I say that I'd rather grind my skin off with a cheese grater and roll around in iodine than stand at an outbound T stop in subzero temperatures. Okay, fine. I exaggerate. A cheese grater was a little gratuitous. A potato peeler would've been more appropriate.

So I get on the T, shivering cold and about to pass out from lack of sleep. I made my way to the back of the T (which, I might add is the proper thing to do when going inbound from an outbound stop so as not to congest the front of the train - but that's a different post altogether). Luckily there were plenty of seats in the back: a ray of sunshine in my otherwise cloudy day.

At the next stop, an interesting young man got on the train and also made his way to the back. He also sat down but in the seat across from mine. Normally a person like this wouldn't have attracted my attention as such, but this situation was unique. By unique, I mean weird. This fifteen-year-old, acne-faced Adonis was behaving quite strangely.

His foot tapped rapidly. Hands twitched. Eyes darted. B.O emanated. This kid had a one way ticket to crazytown and I was along for the ride. Nobody else seemed to notice or care about his strange behavior except for me. I felt like I was in that episode of the Twilight Zone where the man claimed he saw a monster on the wing of the plane, but no one else did. But this was no Twilight Zone; this was life on the green line.

At one point I even feared for my life. The kid was dressed in all black and looked akin to a captain of the trenchcoat mafia and Hitler youth all rolled into one delightful package. By the time the train got to Blandford Street, he reached into his jacket like he was going to draw a gun! My heart raced. Was this it? Was I going to be killed on the T? Was the T going to collect the ultimate toll?

Nope. He didn't pull a gun that day. Instead he jerked forward and vomited all over the floor of the train. Yes, he projectiled right in front of my feet. None of his breakfast got on my shoes but it came pretty close. Everyone cleared the area, save for one kindly woman who offered him a travel pack of Kleenex.

I got off at the next stop. As I walked off the train - and away from the overwhelming stench of vomit - a sickening thought went through my head. His hands had been soaked in puke as he attempted to block its exit from his mouth. I was sure that at some point down the line, he would exit the train and most likely grab several of the T's handle bars as he did.

Probably hundreds of people touched those handle bars throughout that day. And no one knew what they were touching. Granted, my story is an extreme example of how germs could be spread on the T. Unfortunately, though, the T is a cesspool for the spread of germs. Whether it be from sneezing, coughing, bodily fluids, vomit, or just breathing, all kinds of germs are jumping around those trains like a flea at a puppy parade.

Lets get one thing straight: I do not have obsessive compulsive disorder. I'm not that guy that carries a bottle of Lysol around and sprays every doorknob. I don't wash my hands every 10 seconds. But I do have common sense and I don't think it takes a genius to realize how disgustingly germ-infested those trains are.

Dr. Michelle Barron, medical director of Infection Control at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center found these startling results: "Swabs taken from handles and child seats in 36 grocery carts in San Francisco, Chicago, Tucson and Tampa, Fla., found they ranked third worst in both overall cleanliness and bodily-fluid contamination. The only things found to be ickier were playground equipment and the armrests on public transportation."

In another study published by the University of Arizona, "In addition, just over one in two say they always wash their hands or do so most of the time after coming in from being outside (55%), or after sneezing or coughing (51%). But when it comes to cleaning hands after using public transportation or shaking someone’s hand, only one in three (33%) and one in five (17%) respectively say they always wash their hands or do so most of the time."

These statistics make my stomach churn.

I never really washed my hands after using public transportation either. I didn't really think about it. That is, until Puke-ahontas changed everything.

"The Reflection Check-Out"

It's late. You're riding home on the T after a long laborious day at work. Suddenly, out of the monotony of the trip, a beautiful face walks through the doors into the train. Wow. She or He is pretty attractive. You want to take a longer look at them, just to size them up. Or, maybe a completely different type of person enters the T: a crazy lady with a glass eye, a psycho who's talking to himself, or perhaps even the occasional white-collar type with a bad toupee. Whether its the first scenario or the second, the fact is that you want to make a long examination of that person's face or body.

You have three options. First, you could do the "Awkward Stare". This technique is for only the most shameless of human beings. As the name suggests, this method entails looking directly at the target person for as long as the observer desires. Although the most effective method in theory, this method creates the largest residual "sketch-out" factor. The target will often look away, walk to a different part of the train, ask you to stop, or in some extreme cases grab your head by the hair and slam your face against the wall repeatedly until you scream for mercy. That only happened to me once, I swear.

Your second option is the "Stealth Stare." This method, although yielding less satisfaction, is more socially acceptable. You'll pretend to be looking at your book or shoelaces, but at key moments you'll yawn, take out your cell phone, look at your watch, etc. As you're doing this, you'll "accidentally" pass your eyes over the target person, getting a quick glimpse at their beauty/abnormality.

The third option is perhaps the most ingenious. It's also the most dangerous. I dub this third method "The Reflection Check-Out." As a warning, this method is for only the most experienced riders; novices need not attempt. Instead of looking directly at the person, you use the darkened T window as a reflector. In doing so, it appears as if you are innocently looking out the window at the dirty concrete that is passing by. In theory, you can stare as long and as much as you want with any residual "sketch-out". The only downfall of this is that the quality of the reflected image is quite poor in comparison to the "Awkward Stare." As I said before, though, this method is not without peril.

As with any reflection, whatever you can see in the reflection can see you in return. In other words, if you're looking at someone reflected in the window, they could see you back if they happened to look at the window too. This phenomenon is illustrated in figure 1. This is the worst way to be caught looking at someone. Therefore, the reflection check-out can yield possibly the greatest results but with the greatest risk involved. If you did ever get caught doing this, you'll probably get a dirtier look than the one that the smarmy Newbury Comics employee gave you that time you had to buy an Ashlee Simpson CD "as a gift". All you can do is avert your gaze and pretend that the whole thing never happened.

As with anything in life, you must use discretion when undertaking any of these three techniques. As my Mom always said, "It's not polite to stare." But then again, my Mom never rode on the T.

Inverse Logic?

Let's say that it's 1943. You are lead general of the allied powers fighting against Germany. The world depends on you to take down the evil dictator and restore peace to Europe. OK, so its time to plan a strategy. After all, it won't be easy to topple this dastardly dynamo. In the War Room, your chief advisor asks you, "Sir, where should we place our troops for the attack on Berlin?

You decide to station them on the island of Tazmania off the southern coast of Australia.

If this had actually happened during World War II, people around the world would have been furious at your choice. For, why would you put all your troops in a location that's thousands of miles away from where the enemy is? Many would say that you used inverse logic.

Reading that scenario, you probably asked yourself, "What the hell is this psycho talking about?" and closed your internet browser window. Some of you, however, thought to yourself "Why would anyone do such a stupid thing?"

Unfortunately, such "inverse logic" is still being used today in the city of Boston. As of 2004 here are the rider statistics for daily boarding on the T are:

Blue Line: 55,000 passengers
Orange: 160,000 passengers
Red: 214,000 passengers
Green: 225,000 passengers

This statistic, as seen published in the "Not For Tourist's Guide to Boston", was recently revealed to me by a reader of this blog. I was dumbfounded and appalled. Why would the MBTA place such little emphasis on the line that, per day, has the most passengers?

The Red Line and Blue Line are sights of beauty. Their trains, seemingly infinite in length, are efficient, fast, and clean. The Orange Line is just long. But, see if you can follow me here...

The Green Line is quite the opposite. It's one-car cabooses chug along the tracks like Thomas the Tank Engine after chugging a bottle of quaaludes. Unlike Thomas, though, I've never seen a Green Line trolley with a smile on it's face or a word of educational inspiration to youngsters. Moreover, the green line is inefficient, unpredictable, prone to breakdowns and delays, crowded, and in my opinion has the ubiquitous smell of B.O and Limburger Cheese.

The state of the Green Line today might be suitable for a small suburban town of about 40,000 people. Heck, it might even be suitable for Worcester. But, by no means is the Green Line suitable for a city the size of Boston and its outlying burroughs. There is no logical reason why the MBTA shouldn't be placing a higher emphasis on improving the green line over the other lines. In my reasoning it is simple: the best line should be the one that most people ride. It's not rocket science people.

Now, I know some "Red Liners" will tell me that they despise their line as well. They won't understand how I could say that their line is best. But to these people I offer one final challenge: live on the green line for a year. Then we'll talk.