I can’t say that using public transportation is a uniformly pleasant experience; it’s always an interesting one, however. Whenever I ride a bus or a train, I find myself amazed at how complex, organic, and alive the city seems. It’s one thing to look out of one window or another and see buildings, and something completely different to actually focus away from the view scrolling by outside and still see a city because you see people. Whenever I make use of public transportation, I notice a strange phenomenon. Where Prague and Prague exist simultaneously, and in the same space, Chicago does something else. It doesn’t exist as two cities, two convergent realities; it does something else. I suspect this is what Chicago has in common with any large city. There is the city itself, and then there are implications of the city: like the shadow of a character—offstage—falling across the central stage. Members of an audience my not be aware of it, but other participants in the play will undoubtedly see it, and react to it or interact with it. I don’t know the character here or his role in any play, but I find it intriguing that his presence says something about the city in which he lives. There’s an incongruity to his appearance—probably stemming from the fact that he’d recently decided to wear dreads (of the home grown variety: they weren't ripe yet, however.) I was happy to see him as he seems to represent an element of Chicago I thought had been lost. He wasn’t wearing anything even remotely associated with The North Face, or any other acceptable clique-identifier; he wore the beginnings of dreads (twists, not yet matted,) and though he left the Brown Line train in a distinctly Brown Line-ish neighborhood, I didn’t think of him as a typical representative of that neighborhood: he was too flagrantly mammalian. As I've said before, I’ve noticed that there are generally three types of public transport gadget users. Those who divorce themselves from everything, including the friends sitting next to them, those who are simply listening to music (quietly,) and the alien anthropologists who are only pretending to interact with insipid technology: they’re actually recording human activities and listening to translations of human conversations. This guy, I think, represented the second type. He implied by his very existence, that there was a rather more complex city out there, a place that served the needs of people, rather than some voracious corporate machine entertaining itself with facsimiles of reality rather than reality itself. I can’t say that my observations are correct in any way, but I can say that I was inordinately happy to see someone with dreads (a common sight in Prague by the way) listening to music that I didn’t hear. There were others on the train. I was there. Corey was there. North Face clones were there: clucking and chattering like some strange species of flavor-enhanced, edible bird. This guy was alone, aware of where he needed to go, and of where he belonged. As I watched him (silent in a sea of North Face chatter) I got the impression that he belonged in a city I hadn’t seen in years. Never once, did he pull an android, a blackberry, or an iPhone from his pocket and fire off a text. Never once did something in his pocket beep or chime, and when he left the train (three stops before Corey and I did) he seemed sure-footed and goat-like, not plodding, bovine, or somehow demonstrative of intellectual indolence. In short, he was refreshing, and so I had to nab a picture of him, just before he left. As always, I hope you enjoyed this image and its accompanying text, and I thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting. I hope your week is off to a good start.