Strangers with Stories

- I watched Grizzly Man last night. I don’t know who is loonier in the film – Treadwell, the coroner, the girlfriend (who he met working at what is essentially a Medieval Times), or Werner Herzog (the filmmaker) himself. I mean really. His opinions and editorializing (Herzog) bleed all over the film, and while some of that is justified, I really think he goes too far. The scene where he listens to the tape of Treadwell dying feels so manipulative. It’s too much.

- I discovered that I live across the street from the Louisville Free Public Library (link above). It’s a great library (although the copier machines seem to be in a constant state of screwed up). They have free concerts with guest artists like Dar Williams and Iris Dement. And they stock newspapers from around the country, including the Washington Post, which I miss almost as much as I miss DC.

- The other day on my latest 23 Bus adventure this young woman wearing sweat pants and dress shoes asked me if I minded if she smoked while we waited at the bus stop. It’s fine with me I said, and smiled, then turned away. She kept going:

“I quit for a year quit cold turkey but then started up again and I asked because you know some people are allergic to smoke and I wouldn’t want to make you uncomfortable because I did quit for a year but then I started again when I lost my dad I mean I didn’t really lose him he’s still alive but he went back to jail and I’d only known him for the past three years anyhow I didn’t grow up with him he came into my life three years ago and now he’s gone again and that is really tough and I’m not speaking to him now I mean he’s still doing the same drugs he was doing twenty years ago it’s why my mother left him in the first place and maybe if he feels like he might lose his daughter again then this time he’ll get out and stay out it’s just really hard so I started smoking again and it is so cold outside I grew up in Texas and I am just not used to it being this cold I mean I moved here when I was nine but you still remember what you grew up with you know so I will always remember that heat and I have to wear a jacket when it is seventy degrees ‘cause that too just feels so cold to me because I grew up in Texas and wow I am just telling you all this stuff and you are some total stranger but sometimes it is easier to just talk like this to someone you will never see again, know what I mean, huh?”

I’m not kidding. When I realized she was going to keep going on I took my headphones off because while it seemed like she didn’t really care that I had them on it seemed painfully rude to me to keep them on. And I would nod every once in a while. And she just kept on going.

This kind of thing used to happen to me all the time. I guess I had a face that made strangers want to talk to me. But at some point I shut it down. It was getting to be too much. Witnessing the pain and heartache of others felt heavy and weighted, even though they were just words, only stories. The pain still felt so palpable at times. So I adopted what HP Melon calls the “bitch face” and indeed, it pretty much stopped.

But lately I’ve been thinking that this cuts me off from seeing how the rest of the world lives. I know, that sounds condescending, I don’t mean it that way.

But it is good to hear about other people’s lives. Sometimes.