Sometimes, no matter what you do — even when you have headphones on — someone wants to talk to you at the bus stop.

“I’m runnin’ from the police in Alabama. They don’t like coke dealers down there.”

“Do you know about the metric system? It’s a big conspiracy, you know. That’s why President Eisenhower said no.”

“Touch my hair!”

It’s advisable to avoid eye contact as much as possible. Failing that, it helps to have a conversation-stopper handy. Like, “My cult members won’t let me do that without an escort.”

Sometimes when something happens at a bus stop, someone needs help. And almost everyone just stands there and stares.

This is called the bystander effect. The more people are present when something happens, the less likely anyone is to do anything.

The Dada art movement was, in part, about rejecting meticulous planning when creating art. Letting the chips fall where they may. In this case, it was done with an algorithm. But since computers are incapable of generating truly random numbers, I suppose this doesn’t really count.

Oh, well.

Back in the day, your TV used to cut out suddenly in the middle of your favorite show to produce an annoying, high-pitched, multi-tone beep that lasted way too long, followed by a man saying, “This has been a test of the emergency broadcast system. This was only a test. If this had been an actual emergency, blah blah blah.”

I waited for so long to hear what the instructions would be, but it was never an actual emergency.

Focus is elusive when you have circumstantial or tangential thinking. But by the time other people get to point X, you’ve already been there several times.