University of the Tube

Excuse the length.

And after all this talk about the weirdness of the Polish transportation system I entered the London tube to be lectured for a quarter of an hour by a former, hmmm... hippie. Topic of the lecture: the falseness of the Valentines Day. Luckily for the long-haired around 40-year old guy in a thick, orange cotton jacket there was a problem with the train and so it spent around 10 minutes pointlessly standing on a station and than stopping between each of the upcoming two ones. If I believed in him, I would see a touch of god in all this, maybe it was his emissary trying to bring people back to reality, perhaps the only person without falsehood and kind of beyond all the middle-class stiffness and form. (Like the mental brother in Revolutionary Road.)

I was silently sitting on the District line, happy that I ma taking a shorter way and still excited after seeing Shahrukh Khan on a festival that day. A woman next to me was knitting a purple glove and a big-eyed, semi-emo teen opposite to her was reading Tom Stoppard (Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, for those interested) occasionally shaking back his perfectly scruffy hair and looking >out of the window with melancholy. And than the talk started, interrupted with an occasional chord on a guitar. We were kindly welcomed on the day of falsehood, on which the sight of couples holding hands and boys presenting girls with flowers make him and his girlfriend sick. Today and on the New Year’s eve, he said, me and my girlfriend have a day when she can tell me I hate you, you bastard, and I can cal her a stupid old cow. An interesting practise I shall say. But I see his point. After that an entertainment part followed, i.e. a really stunning version of Kiss from A Rose (which he termed a song about cocaine addition). Not only did he have a marvellous voice but he could accompany himself on a guitar, and the tara ra ra rara ra ra ra part did not sound cheesy, kol ha kvod lo. Seriously. I could listen more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WV5sc8xorU&feature=related

And to the right something strange. Equally to this whole event. 'Jake the bus' CCTV in operation beware. And apparently someone is living there. Only in Acton.

If he did not achieve his aim, which I would define as drawing the attention of the public to the idiocy of the festival of simulation, when people do what they think they are expected to (by whom?) just to suit the rest. So, if he didn’t manage to wake up some members of the despised middle-class, at least he initiated some interaction between the passengers, something that NEVER happens on British public transport, believe me. Who cares if people were making fun or commenting on him, at least they talked, were more alive than they are for their whole boring office-tied day. The glove-knitter found a line of understanding with a lady sitting behind her, for both of whom this meeting with a hippie was not a first one. I think I should take this line more often. A surreal train. From a perspective of not even a week this whole thing seems to be like a queer dream. Stranger it seems, yeah.