Train Mind.

While I was sitting on the train today, a ditty began to form in my mind. It was all about this pale girl with henna’d hair who kept turning round and looking at me. (I don’t know why; I wasn’t throwing things at her or wailing or anything.) ‘Aha,’ I thought. ‘I’ll work on this ditty and post it to my blog later. I haven’t posted a ditty for months.’ Unfortunately, I couldn’t get beyond the second line, so I took to working out the percentage by which the train fare had gone up since the last time I went to Derby. I found four different ways of working it out mentally before I got bored.

So then I turned my attention to the two men sitting on the other side of the aisle. One had a back-sloping forehead, while the other had a vertical forehead. I decided that human heads come in three varieties: the Neanderthal, the reptile, and the Neandertile – that’s the middle way and, unsurprisingly, the predominant one. I considered my own and concluded that I’m definitely a reptile. I didn’t know whether to be pleased or not, but shrugged it off as a matter of little import.

As the train entered the outskirts of the city, I looked at the forest of satellite dishes festooning the walls of some modern houses running alongside the track. I looked at the four people closest to me who were all stroking and pressing the screens of smart phones, their ears dripping cable and their awareness oblivious to their fellow travellers. And I realised I would soon be walking through a shopping mall. A shopping mall… I began to have a sense that the crust of characterlessness and the cult of the individual is growing ever thicker in our modern world, and felt a little sad. What a strange thing for a loner to feel.

I turned my thoughts to the priestess, and felt even sadder. The image of the priestess – or, to be more precise, the surface image of the priestess – is somewhat jaded at the moment. It’s what I was referring to in a recent post.

Still, there was a woman in the shopping mall who looked a little like an orang-utan. I like orang-utans, so the day was saved.