The Buffalo Wing Eating Slob on the 5:46.
Sir. This is your second appearance on An Open Letter to, and that’s two too many.
Just 2 1/2 months ago, I chastised you for consuming your chicken wings with blue cheese sauce on a packed evening train in a manner that suggested it was your own private dining car.
I wrote:
You sat in a four-seater along the window. The two aisle seats in the four-bagger were taken, and the (otherwise) empty seat across from you held your dinner.
You greedily shoveled the wings into your mouth, dripping with blue cheese sauce, like you’d just been booted off Survivor. Your seatmates looked at you dubiously, wishing they’d selected any other seat on the train–even the stenchbench. You were impervious to their sidelong glances as you gnawed what little meat remained on the bones.
Don’t your read your mail? Don’t you see yourself in the letter?
Well, Wingman, you took it one step further yesterday.
I was sprinting to the 5:46 and jumped on just before curtains. I walked to the rear for seats–actually, seat would do–and my eyes went wide with the good fortune in front of me: a five-seater with just one seat taken, which meant I could grab an aisle seat and not have anyone in front of me.
But wait. You were the occupier of that one seat, while your stankin’ buffalo wings and blue cheese (and baseball newspaper…always with the baseball newspaper) occupied the seat across from you. Hey–I like wings and blue cheese as much as the next guy, but I tend to enjoy them in a bar, with a pitcher of beer, friends, a bag of wipes, and a bar full of people who do not notice my greedy consumption. Not on a packed commuter train.
But I’ve already pilloried you in this space for those offenses.
I trekked onward, looking for a favorable seat as the train headed through the tunnel.
I foune a suitable one and all seemed to be well. I slipped on the earbuds, tossed open the Times, and forgot about your shoddy behavior.
Jump ahead 40 minutes, and the 5:46 is wheezing its way toward Hawthorne. I started walking toward the front of the train to end up closer to the station stairwell. You’d vacated your seat–you too disembark in Hawthorne. But you indeed left your mark–the detritus from your buffalo wing bacchanal that now looked like a scaled down version of a town dump, there on the train seat. Left behind were a mass of soiled napkins, plastic bags holding bloody bones, the filthy plastic clamshell case that you couldn’t even be bothered to close, much less actually carry off with you and dispose of in a garbage can.
Yes, Sir, the entire world is there for you to make a giant mess on and leave for others to clean up.
An appropriate punishment? You should clean train cars for a week, Wingman, then be made to foot the bill for the MTA’s latest revenue shortfall.
[Even more] Disgustedly,
Trainjotting