I managed to get a seat on a crowded L train while coming home today, so I cracked open the copy of Snow Crash I picked up again today, and happily immersed myself back in Hiro Protagonist’s universe. A little while later, I glance over at the woman sitting next to me, who had been so caught up in something when I boarded the train that she never looked up when we all crowded in around her. I glanced down at the papers she was scribbling on and realized I was next to a bona fide fanatic of some sort.
Well, maybe that’s a bit extreme, but she had filled up a piece of looseleaf with the kind of scrawl usually reserved for manic rantings of the Unabomber variety. Scrawled across the top in big, dark letters were the words “The Birth and Circumcision of Christ,” and then every square millimeter of the page was covered in tight, messy little script, with occasional flares of larger darker phrases. she seemed to copying from — or commenting on — a ragged little booklet that was covered — COVERED — with little notes and different-colored highlighter marks. She was so intense! And suddenly she opened up the binder she was leaning on and I saw that she had at least 150 pages of similar scrawl tucked away! She was a natural born madwoman. It seemed like a Grey Gardens moment waiting to happen.
Or zinester. It all depends on how you channel it.