I Saw It On The Bart

So the other day when I was waiting (a fucking eternity) at the Ashby bart (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station for the Richmond train, I had an awesome idea. I said to myself, “self, you should make a segment on your blog dedicated to stupid shit that people do on the bart. You could call it ‘I saw it on the bart’ and it would be really funny and people would like you because of it. You could even have other people submit stories and then you could write a book based on stories other people have submitted to your blog just like ‘texts from last night’ and ‘fuck my life.’ Then you could get illegitimately wealthy by taking the work of others and claiming it as your own.” And then I looked at the scrolling marquee, which besides telling me that I still had 13 minutes until my train arrived said “Seen and heard on bart! www.bart.gov.” (People in the bay area have a really annoying habit to which I refuse to succumb, which is dropping the article in front of bart. So instead of saying, “I took the bart,” they just say, “I took bart.” Which, because bart sounds like a proper name, makes it seem like they are discussing an actual person in train form. Which is weird. But I digress.) So anyway, I got really fucking pissed that the bart website had taken my idea and I resolved to put plan “I saw it on the bart” into action anyway. So without further ado, here is the first installment.

I saw it on the bart Vol. 1 Ed. 1

Guy at the Ashby station full on sprinting down the up escalator with his bike to make the Freemont train. And then getting yelled at by the train driver for trying to take his bike in the front car. Saw that shit on the bart.

Guy getting real confused by the fact that you have to scan your ticket on the way out of the station as well as on the way in. OK, that was me. That’s not how trains work on the east coast…

Ok, I didn’t really see this on the bart, but outside the downtown Berkeley station some dude was smoking a joint. At 8:30 on a Sunday morning. In public. What was even funnier was the black woman who walked by and said, aloud: “damn somebody be smokin’ them grapes.” Awesome.

Two homeless dudes fighting over a boom box at the top of the escalator of the 16th Street Mission station. This was at once hilarious, and terribly sad.

Two teenage girls getting stuck between two train cars of a moving train because they let the door close behind them before they opened the one in front of them. It made me chuckle.

Hippie man who clearly got dressed in 1969 (sporting flowered shirt, headband, full beard, etc) sitting on a woven blanket playing a sitar. Dude. It’s the year of our lord jesus christ two thousand and nine. This means three things: 1) Playing a sitar hasn’t been cool in approx. 30 years. 2) Lighting a candle and sitting on a blanket outside the Powell bart station has never been cool. 3) You should go to the barber and tell him you’re sick of looking like an asshole. I wanted to hit him upside the head with a fashion magazine. Although it was a pretty interesting dichotomy: him sitting there sporting his 1960s gear with Barney's, Bergdorf Goodman, and Louis Vuitton not half a block away. Funny.

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So here’s the funny thing about “I saw it on the bart”: it looks as though it’s going to end even before it really gets on it’s feet, due to the bart worker’s strike that will be going into effect on Monday. I was mad enough about this strike when it just prevented me from getting to San Francisco in under five hours, now I can also be mad about the fact that it is ruining my ability to find wonderful unintended humor at the expense of others. Hell.