Crazy People on Public Transport

I'm quite certain if they did a world wide study of which city has the most crazy people on public transport, Vancouver, Canada (also the most 'liveable' city in the world) would come in at number one.

Vancouver has a reasonable amount of heroin addicts and lunatics, all of which usually keep to themselves around the East Hastings district. However, they're relative segregation does not apply to public transport where they absolutely flourish in numbers.

This is due to a few influencing factors. One, a lot of the buses in Vancouver are stretchy buses with multiple boarding points. This means that you can board them for free if you board at the rear door. Therefore, a lot more fare-dodging homeless people ride the transport system than in other cities.

The other factors are the natural inclination for crazy people to talk to strangers couple with the general friendly and polite disposition prevalent in Canadian culture.

What results is a super chatty insane person who gets to ride around on a packed bus for free all day long.

I've lived in Vancouver (a city of 2.5 million people) for a year now and I have seen more crazy people than I did living in London (a city of 7 million people) for two years.

But strangely it's not the crazy people that bother me, it's the people that speak back to them in polite conversation  as if they weren't haggard drug addicts with a warped sense of reality.

I learnt in London that whenever someone comes up to you on the street you keep walking as if they weren't there and don't look at them in the eyes or respond verbally. They'll soon realise you're not paying any attention to them and break away to approach some other person in the sea of pedestrians.

I once walked past some homeless person sitting next to a dirty bin and I saw that some young art student was bending down to chat with him.

She was nodding along and having a conversation to him. You know exactly why she's doing it as well. She'll tell you:

'The homeless are ignored in our society, they're human beings just like us and they appreciate being spoken to on the same level.'

Bullshit. She doesn't give a shit about the guy. She's just speaking to the guy so that she can feel better, not the other way around.

So that she can go home with a false sense of satisfaction that she has done some sort of good deed by chit chatting with a heroin addict. Good work Mother Teresa. You've done nothing but feed your own ego.

For some reasons it's always naive, pompous liberal arts students who talk to these crazy homeless people.

Once I was sitting on the bus and a text book Crazy Guy hopped on.

The guy had a big bag of empty cans and bottles with him, he was clearly homeless and absolutely hammered. He sat down and I did what I always do when crazy people get on the bus. I paused my iPod, stopped reading my book and began to eavesdrop for a few minutes to see if they're entertaining.

The Crazy Guy sat across from a skinny Student with glasses and school books tucked into a Hessian jute bag. The Crazy Guy, started making conversation with anyone who would listen and the Student began to return polite conversation as if he the man was a real human being.

The conversation went like this:

Crazy Man: 'Yeh mang, these are me cans. Take 'em up to Burral Street you know? Cash 'em in, it's what I do, I got to work with the system man, to keep alive. Yep.'

Student (nodding in profound agreement): I see. Yeah, okay. Cool. What else do you do?

Boring!

I went back to my iPod and my book as the two passengers became best buddies.

After a while, I noticed that the Crazy Man was talking much more energetically and the Student had a look of horror on his face. The Crazy Man was showing him a pencil and thrusting it into the air to demonstrate something. I turned down my iPod:

Crazy Man: 'With the right amount of pressure on the tip this will puncture a man's skin just as deep as a knife. With a knife, though you have to pull it out, and carry it around. That's the benefit of pencils.'

The Crazy Man pulled another six pencils from his pocket.

Crazy Man: 'With these I can stick it into someone and then leave them dry. It works every time. You push it through their ribs and walk away. It's you or them. You have to survive on the street, you know?'

Student (pale white and quivering): 'Oh, o-okay, yeah, is that so?'

Yep. That's what you get for treating a crazy homeless person like a regular human being. It's not as simple as this whole 'we're all human beings' bullshit. They live in another world then us.

Another thing that shits me about talkative crazy people. How come they never ask me about how things are going in my life?  They're always trying to explain some caper or what they do on the street without ever giving a fuck about what I do for a living. Last time I checked a conversation was two ways, I have a passions, I have tastes and desires, show an interest in me for a change.

That's probably why their homeless in the first place, no-one liked talking to them because they wouldn't shut the fuck up about themselves or show interest in the other people so they lost all their friends and eventually turned to drugs which put them on a one way street to a bed in a dumpster.