Scrabble night fires burn on in Area 4 as a dedicated household searches for ways to open up the board and lay down all seven tiles down into one lyrical dream + 50 bonus points. But I am not here today to talk about Scrabble. I want to open up a little. You see, over the last few days I have experienced something truly remarkable, that needs to be related to the public in order that you all better understand the Universe that I cross every day, that knows not the boundary between my open mind and the firmament of the stars… ready?
On Saturday I had to work extended lunch hours at the hotel to accommodate holiday shoppers at the Copley Place Mall. We stopped seating at 3:45 at the Fisheries. I finished my tables then changed clothes and hit the street to get back to Cambridge, for work at the Grill was due to start at 4 PM. Of course I called numerous times to let them know that the situation was a little different and that I would be late for hosting that night. But the lateness was just beginning. Perhaps because of the massive snow dump that the Boston sky left on the Boston streets last Friday, the Red Line was down between MIT and Park St.
Down in the tunnel MBTA workers directed commuters back up to the light of the Boston Common to board shuttle buses at the Park St. Station. I hustled up the stairs while the sheep and cows took the escalator and boarded the first available. Able to find a seat, I sat and watched as the bus basically crept along at three or four feet a minute in a gigantic loop around the Boston Common. Probably because of all the damned one way streets and the rush hour traffic and the holiday shoppers at Copley Place Mall there was no way to move quickly. We were stuck one bus back in a convoy of shuttles and everyone packed like sardines in the vehicle knew that the situation was grim.
A boy sitting next to me asked me how many stops we would be shuttled and if they would let him back on the Red Line when the shuttling was through. Without making much eye contact I answered his questions. Most strangers don’t talk to me, and the ones that do are highly dubious, even to me. He listened to me call into the Grill to tell them that I was on the shuttle bus but that the shuttling was painfully slow. The shuttle bus itself made a rectangular loop around the Common and we passed so many trees strung up with twinkling lights as the darkness set. “Don’t you hate how early it gets dark here?” the stranger boy asked me.
Twisting in my seat to look him right in the eye, I exclaimed, “Where the hell are you from, Hawaii?!” I mean, everyone from any region which uses the Western calendar in tandem with daylight savings time knows that the next week and a half until December 21 will be the progressively darkest days of the year, and only then will it begin to lighten up. The stranger boy met my eyes and said, “I was born in Hawaii.” My exclamation had been culled from my frustration with the slow-shuttle, but also from my precise knowledge of the American regions that have banned Daylight Laws. Hawaii is one of them, as is, I believe, Nebraska. Those islanders and the corn-fed take very little Daylight Savings shit from anybody.
Now that we had established a rapport our mutual attention turned to a man standing about three feet away from our shared seat, up at the very front of the bus. He had one of those recrafted ears made out of tissue from his butt or inner thigh. Also, right above the grafted or regrafted crafted ear was a little black box jutting right out of his skull. It appeared to be an electronic hearing device wired straight into his brain. The stranger boy and I discussed what the hell was going on with this man’s hearing, probably within his superhuman earshot. Cartiledge doesn’t have blood vessels, strangerboy explained, so the recrafted grafted ear was probably made of that. That way it couldn’t be rejected by the brain-area, like a deadman’s finger might be if the donor and transplant recievers blood types are slightly different.
As for the electronic black box, I wondered aloud if it went straight into the brain-piece itself. No, explained strangerboy helpfully. That would invite infection. More likely its hooked up to the most dense part of the braincase, the skull itself. The density of bone is very high, so if wired to a sensitive reciever it can be used to pick up quiet vibrations. Throughout our contemplation we also tried to see if the man’s other ear was a recrafted graft. Finally the man turned his head and we saw the other ear. It wasn’t pretty, but was not as obvious a graft and lacked the black box of the formidable side we originally discussed.
At MIT we reboarded the Red Line together and the stranger boy told me his name was Jim, which I remembered as James, and told me he was from California and visiting a friend at Harvard Sq. I introduced myself and gave him my Lanes & Games Bowling Business Card with 3rdarm.biz scrawled on the back. Check the address I said. Are you a blogger like Maddox? he asked. I told him I didn’t compare myself to any others except Matt Drudge himself and that I had my own radio program that sometimes draws as many as two live listeners. So hopefully I will hear from him soon and with permission post James views on the 3rdarm.biz.
End of story, right? No way! Monday morning I had to get to the hotel early for work on an Executive Sandwich Buffet (which subsequently dominated my psyche for hours). The Central platform on the Red Line was packed and I couldn’t board the first train because of the human packing. So I strategically placed myself farther down the platform although this would mean I would lose my perfect line up with the Green Line transfer at the Park Street station. The second train came and I just barely made it on, mainly due to the help of a big girl with no less than two and a half feet of LL Bean backpack, who swung it around carelessly like she had no clue of her dimensions in reality that morning. Like a freaking Godzilla tail.
I barely made it on the second train, but the human packing began to dissepate a couple of stops later at Mass General as more commuters departed than boarded the train. Thats when I realized that in the closest seat to where i was standing the strangerboy was sitting with all his bags. Hey! I said. Whats your name again? He told me that it was Jim and I said, oh thought it was James. I guess its both. He had all his stuff and was heading to the airport to fly back to Cali. Remarkable coincidence to the black box inside my brainbox that in the human ocean two beings can find themselves riding the same rails twice. But then my brain is a recrafted graft made of cartiledge from my butt.