Another day of public transportation.

What you get on public transportation is: The Public. The real public, the full range. Which is a good thing to be exposed to, because you wouldn’t want to go along your merry way thinking the world was primarily made up of a bunch of people with all their ducks in a row. That would be inaccurate. A lot of people in the world don’t even have any two ducks in the same pond. Or all their marbles in the same cranial cavity, for that matter.

Yesterday one such person, or perhaps group of persons, concluded that at least for the day, their purpose in life was to defile the ticket dispensers with a brown sticky substance that could’ve been a melted, dried up carmel bar. I’d rather not let my imagination go further with it. The one consoling feature was that it did not have a discernible odor. Anyway it was a feat of dextral agility to extract my ticket from behind the little swinging plastic shield in the ticket slot without touching it.

Once on board the Max I discovered that some of the substance had ended up on one of my fingernails. For the duration of my ride I felt a burning compulsion to amputate my hand.

In the last two weeks I’ve ridden the Max out to Gresham and back six times. On three of those times I have been asked to show my ticket. So apparently rumors that you don’t really have to pay to ride the Max have been greatly exaggerated.