BUS PEOPLE 4 - The Smiling Guy

He's sitting in the left front. From my standing position near the rear exit, I have the perfect vantage point. He's wearing black combat boots, jeans, dark grey windbreaker. He's got a black knapsack. Between the dark brown bowl-cut, the glasses, and the nose his thin face can't quite support, he comes off as dorky. In other words, he's the quintessentially average university student. Except he keeps looking around at people and then smiling to himself. He even chuckles occasionally. That's what draws my attention to him. My first reaction is that I'm looking at someone like me--an observer, an anthropologist of the human animal in the behavioral pressure-cooker that is public transit.

But after observing my fellow-observer for a while, I begin to feel a kind of antipathy toward the smiling guy. There seems to be a smugness in his attitude, a sense of superiority. For another thing, I want to know exactly what he finds so fucking funny. As I ponder this I start to feel vaguely uneasy. What if I'm the one he's looking at to amuse himself? I imagine that he is somehow seeing through my pose of disaffected aloofness, that all the ridiculous conceits and pathetic anxieties that drive me are being laid bare before his ironic gaze like scuttling bugs under an upturned rock.

So I look at him again, this time with an intense stare meant to match and master his penetrating insight, and all I see is some dummy giggling to himself on the bus. And I realize that paranoia is another conceit to add to my list.