It’s honestly unfathomable. That someone—hordes of someones, in fact—could be so okay with picking themselves in public. That word, picking, extending to many possible facets of the body. On the train or bus, Natalie found, the body tended to be hyper-exposed. Even during the fall and winter months, her fellow “travelers” managed to find ways to touch the few patches of bare skin that weren’t covered by some unwieldy jacket and other assorted layers. And, of course, they could always take their gloves off to pick at the flesh on their fingers once they got inside the warm, “safe” confines of the train or bus. But nothing felt safe to Natalie once she was trapped inside one of these metal contraptions. Because she knew, sooner or later, someone would start picking. 

Natalie probably hadn’t become so sensitive to it until she moved to London, where all stereotypes of being Britishly “civilized” on the Tube and New Routemasters (for the untrained, that means “double-decker bus”) went out the window. Which was, most times, unfortunately closed. She had hoped she would be able to find a job within walking distance of her neighborhood, but when she ended up settling in the suburb of Nunhead, she found little in the way of employment opportunities…regardless of the so-called gentrification that had transpired there. So commuting, in the end, was an inevitability. Like death. As a matter of fact, there were times when she wondered if hell could really be much worse than what one endured on public transportation. That is, if one was still sentient. Hadn’t “tuned out” entirely. Long ago, when boomer hippies were instructing people to “turn on, tune in, drop out,” they might never have guessed that what it would eventually be reduced to was just “tune out.” Desensitize yourself. To the point where not only does no image or terrifying news headline affect you, but you can’t even hear the disgusting sound you’re making right next to an innocent bystander. Or, often, when it comes to the bus/train, “bysitter.” You’re so “tuned out,” in fact, that you hardly remember to register that you exist in the world with other people at all. 

People like Natalie, who can still hear and generally perceive what’s going on around them. Including the pick, pick, pick of a hangnail. And, by the way, excessive hangnail-picking is not excoriation as much as it is onychotillomania, its own special breed of horrifying public behavior. Behavior that most people riding the train seemed to have no qualms about displaying to a group of perfect strangers. Once upon a time, Natalie was sure, this was unheard of. She reckoned that if you could travel back in time to the 1950s and ride, say, the Piccadilly line, you’d be liable to find a slew of primly-sitting passengers calmly awaiting the arrival of their stop. Maybe even—gasp—reading! Not literally twiddling their thumbs, picking their skin and fingering the shit out of their phone…all, somehow, at the same time.

Timothy Leary, the man who took credit for the aforementioned “turn on, tune in, drop out” phrase (even though he freely admitted it was Marshall McLuhan who gave him the advertising-y slogan) had said that, “‘turn on’ meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers engaging them… ‘Tune in’ meant interact harmoniously with the world around you…” It appeared, to Natalie, that she was the only one taking that sentiment to heart. Not just in her sensitivity to the levels of consciousness and the many specific triggers engaging them that included hearing (and, worse still, seeing…sometimes from a full-frontal perspective or out of the corner of her eye) the indescribable sound of skin-picking. But also to her apparently singular decision to interact harmoniously with the world around her. Or try to. Because it was pretty fucking hard to act that way when you wanted to smack the shit out of everyone. Every single person. Because they all managed to commit the cardinal sin of grooming themselves in a public venue. Preening like savage animals as they did grotesque things, such as eating their obviously cheap food (that also smelled vomit-inducing) loudly, cutting their nails (far more affronting than just picking a hangnail) or applying mascara or putting on lip gloss/lipstick in a bombastic manner that somehow “required” the smacking and puckering of lips to the point where Natalie wanted to slap them right off and scream, “No one wants to kiss your whore face anyway!”

She couldn’t say how many times, by now, she had teetered dangerously close to committing murder. Suffice it to say, it was enough to question whether or not she should keep riding public transportation. Just another phrase for hell on Earth (Shakespeare surely must have been talking about “Tube pickers” when he wrote, “Hell is empty and all the devils are here”). Especially to a person who hadn’t opted to dull all of her senses with the twenty-first century drug of choice: social media/the internet. Natalie would have much preferred to simply read on the bus or train, but doing so was often impossible because of how sensitive she was to the noises of the “groomers.” “Barbarians” was the more accurate description though. How could they all be so goddamn comfortable doing what they did in front of others? It truly baffled Natalie, who would absolutely never dream of engaging in such unabashed uncouthness. 

This was how she felt during the first few years of her tenure in London. Her contempt for the rest of humanity burned with the fire of a thousand suns until one day, out of nowhere, she found herself doing something unthinkable. As though she were being guided by the hand of some invisible force. A hand that made her own hand reach inside her purse and pull out something she did not recall previously placing there: a pair of nail clippers. Natalie then watched herself, as though she had floated up out of her body, proceed to loudly clip each one of her fingernails and let the “debris” fall casually to the floor. No fucks given, as it is said. When had she become this person? At what point, in her now countless number of rides, had this transformation occurred? When had she lost sight of who she was? Someone “civilized.” Someone who had consideration and respect for others…until, she supposed, it was made clear that no one had consideration or respect for her. 

Studying her carapace as it continued to clip away, some faint trace of who she had been flickered inside of her to scream, “You’ve been mad and numb all along!” And that’s when Natalie—the Natalie hovering above her corporeal self, that is—remembered. She was experiencing eternal damnation for her excoriation. This was her punishment now. To believe that she was “well-mannered” for an indeterminate period before being shocked back to the true reality of her situation. Which was that Natalie was condemned to an eternity spent on the train (or bus, depending on the day) thinking that she was the only “courteous” passenger before “God” or whoever gave her the whiplash of seeing herself as she truly was: just as foul as the rest of the riffraff.

This was her comeuppance. As it should be everyone’s who dares to pick themselves with the same abandon they would in the privacy of their home. The one they pay for by riding the train and/or bus to work and, in doing so, drive everyone else to become as insane as they are. Madness is a contagion, after all—and capitalism is the biggest ongoing form of madness there is. Apart from, (un)naturally, excoriation.