After yesterday’s post a reader forwarded me an email from her friend that describes what I was talking about. To refresh your memory here is what I wrote:

Any “people person” would start getting very uncomfortable if the guy on the bus next to you starts hacking away his flem or reeking of body odor or having a loud, profanity-laden fight on the phone. Riding the subway with a rude group of kids causing a ruckus is an event that educated people must tell anyone that will listen.

The email:

I’m just getting settled in. Oh my god it was the ride from hell. First off, getting stopped by cops, put us off by a good 15 minutes. Then, I have a metal chunk of crap where my feet are to sit, and a morbidly obese man squirming not to touch me next to me. This means I get half my seat. He is generating a lot of body heat.

Stopover. Smelly looking tree planters exchange notes on their equipment, some guy tries and fails to pick the hippie girls up. Everyone’s standing outside to get the best seat, mosquitoes are going crazy, it’s raining. There are tons of fat people wandering in from *****, mullets and bleached blond hair. I contemplate asking one of the skinny tree hugger girls to sit next to me.

I chuck someone’s water bottle down the aisle under the chairs, and take a window seat, only to discover two large native men peering at me. I’ve taken their seats, and chucked their water bottle. A skinny man that looks like a gold digger from the Klondike demands to know if I was on before, and how it is I forgot my seat. I take a new seat, slink down, and stare intently at my ticket.

A girl sits beside me. Next to her, four African men reeking of cologne. They talk for the next 10 hours straight in a language that sounds like a swamp bubbling. Behind me, two native men reeking of booze and cigarettes. “With my luck, we’ll hit a tanker truck.” “With mine, we won’t.” Something starts banging under my chair, loud, at random. Then my seat starts to wobble. The natives suspect the wheel axis is coming off, and that the wheel is going to fly off the bus. They then FALL ASLEEP. I pop two codeines and eventually have to tell the driver something funny is going on. We stop in parry sound for tim’s and he looks at it, for a second. I figure I’ve done all I can to prevent my death here.

The african men get off at ******. Their luggage is not on the bus. They start bellowing and lunging at the driver, who yells back. Everyone is looking out the window, and it looks like we might have a fight on our hands after 10 hours in the bus. Driver gets on and closes the door.

A man in the back coughs a deep cough from his lungs, then swallows his snot. Someone tells him to cover his mouth when he does that. TB TB TB. I run to the front of the bus near *******, open my own coach luggage door and grab my luggage. I hurl myself into a cab before those slugs have even stirred from their slumber.

The email had complaints about body odor, flem, and fighting, among others. Eerie coincidence or validation that what I speak of is real absolute truth?

I’m positive the email came from a woman who is pro-environment, anti-war, hyper educated, a voracious reader, has donated to the Sally Struthers aid program, owns or considers owning a hybrid, and who considers herself a lover of people. Yet if a plumber in her home or a polite bus driver engaged her in conversation she wouldn’t know what to say, and that’s the issue with educated First World inhabitants who wrap themselves up in the cocoon and have no knowledge or experience of people not like them.

Next month… You’re Not As Open Minded As You Think.

I was talking to someone about public transportation and he made a comment about how he doesn’t like taking the bus because there is a lot of crazy people on it. Take note that he was a city dweller where bus patrons tend to be more educated with proper jobs that that make mom proud. Here in the suburbs you’re lucky if the person sitting next to you has a high school education and can speak English, though that is changing before my eyes as gas prices shoot through the roof. Call me a suburb bus pioneer, if you will.

Here’s the thing about your life right now. You get up in the morning, go in your car cocoon shell (or ride the subway with people like you who have jobs that took an interview longer than ten minutes to get), go to work with other smart people, go to the gym with health conscious people, shop at Trade Joes or Whole Foods where everyone knows what a trans fat is, and then go to the bar or club with more educated or smart people (though rarely beautiful since this is Washington DC we’re talking about). Well that’s not reality.

The humans you are interacting with on a daily basic or a tiny subset of the range of humans that exist. The majority of humans alive today are stupid, dirty, poor, or batshit insane. The only time you catch a glimpse of this is when a homeless person asks you for spare change but living in a wealthy city makes these encounters the anomaly instead of the rule. The human existence is miserable, desolate, brutish, and until recently, short. Remember: the United States is a rich country and most countries of the world are not rich, especially ones that are heavily populated. And let’s be honest, 99.9% of you have never been out of North America besides some Caribbean beach resort for Spring Break.

The point is that you like people less than you think you do, especially if you claim to be a “people person,” something I hear occasionally, usually from a woman who works in PR or human resources. Any “people person” would start getting very uncomfortable if the guy on the bus next to you starts hacking away his flem or reeking of body odor or having a loud, profanity-laden fight on the phone. Riding the subway with a rude group of kids causing a ruckus is an event that educated people must tell anyone that will listen.

You’re only similar to the 0.000001% of the human population that is clean and educated like you and who has the embarrassment filter that prevents any acting up in public or doing anything someone educated would deem weird or strange. Accept that you hate people and if a monster tsunami wiped out another 200,000 people in Southeast Asia you’d be annoyed that news coverage preempted your favorite television show, The Bachelor.

You disgust me.