Other characters I love are:

-Old woman who does all her makeup and hair on the train.  She uses aerosol hairspray BTW and it gets on me if she sits next to me.  She also uses about 4 packs of those travel Kleenex pouches in one sitting, somehow.  I don’t have the guts to turn toward her and watch her do her thing so I’ve only seen her face when she first gets on the train and right when she walks off.  The weird thing is that she looks exactly the same.  Hmmm.  Must be that new invisible makeup line from Europe.

-Super smiley dude who resembles “Bob” from Twin Peaks.  He wears a very large puffy coat and has very white shoulder length hair.  Some days he seems wasted.  Other days he seems totally put together.  Every day he has his big coat and crazy creepy grin.  Sometimes he laughs to himself.  He has never said anything mean to me so that’s nice.  Thanks dude.

-Super aggro Muni driver.  It’s 6:00 in the morning.  Please try and refrain from blasting your horn at any chance you get.  Also, it’s probably not good for company moral that you talk shit about Muni like every day on the loudspeaker.

Most people just sit there and either read or nod off for a quick nap before they get downtown.  Others enjoy breakfast on the train.  I am not opposed to this as long as it’s a nice, subtle breakfast that doesn’t cause a huge mess and doesn’t fill the car up with a lingering odor.  Things that are acceptable to me are most fruits, granola bars, donuts, oatmeal.  The one thing that could be literally the WORST Muni breakfast choice is a hot dog from 7/11.

First of all let’s get one thing straight: I have nothing against hot dogs.  I definitely don’t eat them every day and have only purchased maybe three packs in my life (pigs in a blanket anyone?) but every now and then, you need dat dawg.  Choosing a hot dog as your first meal of the day seems too risky.  You don’t know how your insides are gonna react to that dog.  You may be setting yourself up for a disastrous day at work.  Probably better to stick to things that are well-established breakfast foods.

Second, I have never walked by a case of glistening spinning hot dogs proudly displayed on the 7/11 counter by the 5 Hour Energy Drinks and been like, “Yum.  I need that in my life.”  Who knows how long these have been stuck in their greasy spinning purgatory!  Were they leftover from the day before?  Would anyone even notice if they were?

Third, eating a hot dog is not a glamorous feat.  It’s messy, it’s stinky, and, let’s be honest, it’s fucking phallic.

The kid who got on the train this morning DIDN’T GIVE A FUCK.  He jumped on with his hot dog and several packets of condiments.  Apparently he didn’t have enough time to dress his breakfast dog in the store, but what better place to top it than a jolting, moving, urine soaked Muni car?!!  Sure why not!

He opened the cardboard clam shell, placed the dog on the seat next to him and began to open little packets of mustard, ketchup and relish.  After he meticulously dressed his breakfast dog, I could have sworn I saw him nod and give himself a silent “Hell Yeah, Dog”.

He ate the entire thing in about five stops.  Luckily he had plenty of napkins to wipe his face and hands clean. He placed the napkins, and the empty condiment packets in his now empty clam shell and sat there ready for his sodium-fueled day.

After a while, I think my body got used to the smell and I didn’t notice it anymore.  I once had an elderly piano teacher who had maybe 15 cats and her house smelled horribly of cat urine which is the worst kind of urine.  When I first entered her house, I almost threw up but after a while, I didn’t notice a thing.  Same thing with the hot dog.  People just entering the car would climb up the stairs and immediately gag a little.  It was actually quite comical to watch.

When he got off the train, Breakfast Dog Dude took his trash with him and even looked back to see if he had left any trash on the train.  After confirming everything was okay, he got off and started his day.  At first I was mad at the kid, but by the time he got off the train, I liked him.  That dude was like, “Man I’m hungry.  And I feel like a hot dog.” and he made his dream a reality.  You gotta respect that.  I’d much rather sit next to Breakfast Dog Dude than the drunkies in the second car.  Maybe next time those drunk dudes go into a 7/11, they should stop buying so many cans of Natty Ice and go for a nice, satisfying breakfast hot dog to start their day off right.

I caught myself staring at her for a little too long and didn’t want to look like that guy on the train so I shook my head and snapped out of it.  But just as I was turning to look at the happy dogs running around Duboce Park, the tall blonde whipped out her iPhone and went to unlock it.  The phone had a normal, humble black case that matched her black ear buds.  Nothing crazy there.  But.  Her phone wallpaper image caught my eye because it was a selfie of her smiling back at herself.

I tried to go through the steps it took for her to go from the stock grey stone wallpaper that comes with your phone to deciding to use the selfie she took of herself on a good hair day.  First, she had to take the selfie.

Now, I’m not really a selfie person.  When I’m on my phone trying to take a picture and I accidentally push the “Face Time” mode on the camera, a double chinned, high contrasty version of me comes up and I start to rethink the way I let myself leave the house in the morning.  I’ve never taken a selfie where I was like, “Holy shit.  This is the one.  I look AMAZING.”  Instead, I’m like, “Holy shit.  Maybe I should invest in microdermabrasion and lose like 3o pounds.”.  But for Blondie, I bet she did her hair and proclaimed, “Holy shit.  I am on FIRE today.  Gotta document this.”  So she snapped five or six selfies and decided on the perfect one to use as her new Facebook photo.

So we’ve got the selfie.  Next is the decision to set it as her wallpaper on her phone.  I once tried to have a cool wallpaper on my phone, but I don’t have children or pets to blast on there, so I just kept the generic mason design and left it at that.  I’m sure Blondie has kids and probably a really cute dog that resembles her fluffy locks.  Why not choose that as the wallpaper?  No.  Not as cute as her selfie so that’s the one she went with.

Maybe she’s onto something.  Maybe a nice photo of yourself staring back at yourself is like buying one of those “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters that gets you pumped up every morning.  Maybe the selfie pushes her to be a better person each day.  Maybe I should try it for a week and see how it changes my life…

…nope.

As Blondie left the train I smiled at her (trying to be as un-creepy as I could be) and she left the train with a smile on her face.  I silently gave her a “You go girl” and only hoped I had a shred of her self-confidence when I’m her age.  Hell, I’d like to have a shred of it at my current age.

Then I stopped and thought to myself, maybe she has an identical twin and it’s just a picture of her as her wallpaper and I’m just a giant asshole for thinking about it too much.  Oh well.