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O.K., California has declared second-hand smoke a toxic air pollutant. First of all, duh. Of course it is - it's foul. I'm all for a smoking ban in restaurants and other public buildings; I really hate it when I find myself in a little brown cloud of someone else's dependency, and separate smoking areas really don't work. I had a neighbour in Milwaukee who smoked...she was on the other side of my closet wall, and when she was really sucking them down my coats would pick up the smell. That's really gross to have to carry with you. Still, I think there are bigger fish to fry. Let's try cutting our obscene car use, or maybe muzzling heavy-polluting factories. The freeway does more to destroy our air than does a pack of Camels. You can see the ribbon of brown soup hanging over the daily commute, and that ends up in our lungs. Is it any surprise that one in ten Canadian children has asthma? But no, we can't spend more on public transit...we're too strapped paying for medical costs like fighting asthma. Speaking of transit... The streetcar is always an interesting slice of humanity. Yesterday, as I went from St. Bart's to Trinity College, a woman got on. She was a bit ragged, her eyes never stopped moving and she was muttering to herself. She sat next to a man in front of me. Her private conversation wasn't violent and it wasn't loud, but after maybe five minutes the man shot out of his seat and fled to the front of the streetcar. "I'm sorry! I just can't take people talking to themselves! It gets to me!" On some level I share the guy's sentiment. Encountering people with mental illness opens a raw vulnerability in the human psyche...our mind is what makes us unique, different from other animals. (No matter how clever porpoises or chimps turn out to be, we're still a long shot past them...despite the popularity of Elimidate.) To overhear these voiced internal monologues is to witness a shattered person following confused logic down dark and twisting dead-end passages. It's not comfortable, especially in the confines of a streetcar. On the other hand, the woman in question couldn't help it; she wasn't being malicious. This is simply who she is, and while it'd better if her mind worked normally she's still a fellow human. The man slumped in his new seat, head resting against the cold window as if he knew how insensitive he'd been. Perhaps, like the woman, he just couldn't help it. Facing that fearful, unknown cloud is not for everyone. I know it gets under my skin, too, though perhaps not as violently. Thinking about this, I wondered what the man might do to cope with the inevitable streetcar mutterers and chatters and proclaimers. You can't avoid it, especially in Toronto, so better to learn to deal with it. Then I realized...an insane person talking to herself is, from the standpoint of an onlooker, functionally no different than someone talking on a cell phone. O.K., sure, there's usually less swearing in a cell phone conversation (though not always) but otherwise you'd hardly tell the difference. You hear one side of the conversation, the person talking is oblivious to his or her surroundings and it completely annoys the rest of the passengers. In fact, I can't be sure that this woman wasn't just wearing a tiny cell phone and ear bud. So I tried it later that day. As the streetcar trundled down Roncesvalles we were all treated to the bold announcements of a woman clearly far gone into madness. "Cindy, I want Cindy, Cindy Lauper, I want Cindy Lauper...and Steve." So I turned her mono-dialogue into a slightly eccentric phone conversation... Person on the other end of the phone: "Can we get Betty to play second base?" Actually, I think that makes her sound crazier. |
