I feel so smug when I'm on the train gliding along, watching the world pass by, knowing I don't have to watch the traffic and I don't have to find a parking space when I get there and it's just a two block walk to the exact spot I want to get to and, and, I just love it!

Besides that, there's free entertainment in every car.

Two stops down from where I had embarked, a rather handsome man, with long dark frizzy hair, and John Lennon glasses got on. He was carrying a white plastic bag with what looked like magazines in it. He sat down two seats away, facing me.

Pretty quick, I realized there was something different about our frizzy haired friend. He was talking. Not to himself either. [Talking to yourself has a long and glorious tradition]. . . but he was leaning in to an invisible personage on his right, in a very engaging and familiar manner, whispering some sublime confidentialities. I noticed that he had left the seat next to the window open for his "friend". The look on his face and the manner in which he spoke to the empty space was so . . . .interesting. I found myself consumed with curiosity to find out what they.... ahem.... I mean he was talking about. It looked like a scintillating conversation, full of double entendres and innuendos.

I sat thinking.

Hmmm, thought I.

Being schizophrenic might have its up sides. One had to consider the delightful possibility that one would never be alone. One would always have one's best bud around to share exquisite confidences with. And hey, as long as your best bud wasn't telling you to set off a bomb at some local government establishment, shoot, it might even be really fun.

Then I saw something else. Our hero leaned over to his left and whispered in the imaginary ear of ANOTHER imaginary friend. Now I think, if I had been able to see this person, he (or she) would have been sqatting down in the aisle. Our chatty fellow passenger even leaned down and gave this friend the elbow for emphasis on some humorous point he was obviously making.

This gave me pause. I sat blinking trying to process this new bit of information. But we had come up to the 39th Street station and all three of them got off.

Then it dawned on me.

I wonder how many people I had seen walking around with a cell phone, chatting away were REALLY talking to REALLY REAL people? If that fact was in question, then I may have been the only sane person riding the light rail yesterday.

Makes you think.