It happened to me again last night.

I sat down on the subway and a man sat next to me and immediately started talking. He had three or four ideas, ideas which were not really connected to each other, that he kept coming back to. Over and over again. He periodically asked me if I understood what he was saying, but when I tried to give more than a two word answer, he talked over me until I stopped.

In this case, the man was black (not that that means anything: most often in my experience he has been white). His obsessive talk started being about colonialism in the Philippines (which was odd because he was from Ethiopia – at no time did I get the sense that he had ever been to the Philippines); somewhere in his monologue were observations about the fistfight that broke out in Canadian Parliament because of the repatriation of the Constitution from colonial England and trade negotiations being a form of control of smaller nations. In describing it this way, I’m making what the man said sound a lot more coherent than it actually was. This was just one more example to me of a mind trying to make sense of a jumble of disjointed information and, to my ears, failing, although it obviously made sense to the man who was speaking.

I used to wonder why these people found me. A few years ago, I realized that that was the wrong way to look at what was happening. They will take to anybody. The difference is that I will politely sit and listen to them instead of telling them to stop talking or moving away. Why do I do that? Because I’m basically an introvert who doesn’t want to be involved in a public scene? Because people like this make great fictional characters? Because I have, in the past, been forced to question my own thought processes and way of looking at the world, so I can empathize with these people? All of the above?

When I used to teach, I would try and impress upon my students that they should pay attention to everything and everyone in their environment because the world was an artist’s raw material. The human mind malfunctioning doesn’t get much rawer than this.