Yesterday, I heard someone fall off the end of the escalator on the Shady Grove of Metro Center. It's a very distinctive sound, the sound a falling person makes. Well, actually, there are a host different sounds, but they are all distinctive. Before I turned around to look and see if the guy (I already knew it was a guy) needed help, I knew he wouldn't. See, the sound he made as he fell was a nice solid sort of thud. Sort of like the sound a stack of phone books would makes if you dropped them onto the first floor of your hip, warehouse loft condo. It's always a relief when someone falls and makes a thud. It's when you hear a snap, crackle, and pop that you know something bad happened, usually to a little old lady. That "thud" sound told me to things: 1 the person had a lot padding, so he probably wasn't hurt, and 2, he is some kind of idiot. I was actually wrong on the second point, though. It appeared that he had been tripped up by some weird plastic piece of litter, so it was someone else's fault. Anyway, he bounded right back up with an embarassed look on his face and shooed away his potential assistors. And that was that.

I will also take this chance to mention the most horrible display of fashion gone awry that I think I have ever seen on the train. There was this woman, she looked reasonably well put-together, fashionable some might even say. However, and this is a big however, she was wearing a silk-screened coat. A silk-screened coat with a stylized cartoon of a hipster girl in a green hoodie. The pattern was varied so that some of the cartoons showed only the girls face while others showed her from the waist up. It was a horrible abomination that should have been taken out behind the shed and shot three times. Not the woman, just the jacket. The woman looked perfectly normal. Except for the jacket. I'll never understand that one.