Carcinogens

Here's what I had to listen to for my whole damn commute — this morning and afternoon — inane teenage cell phone yap, peppered with trendy MTV-talk and ring tones. I wanted to gag these chatterboxes sitting next to me, something to shut them up so I could finish my miserable, overpriced train ride in relative peace. Maybe the gamma rays or whatever leaking out of the cell phone would give them a brain aneurysm mid-sentence fragment. These cell phones are supposed to cause cancer or something, aren't they?

The problem, as I see it, isn't that cell phones spew radiation; it's that they don't spew enough of it. I don't know why it is, but with all the things out there that could kill you — ebola virus, running with the bulls, irate person next to you on the train driven mad by your incessant yakking — the only that seems to scare the shit out of Americans is cancer. Like, I was at the train station in Somerville yesterday, and there's an eastbound track and a westbound track and a chain-link fence separating the two. So this guy standing on the westbound platform and his buddy's on the eastbound platform, and the guy wants to talk to his buddy but he doesn't want to use his cell phone because, hell, those things cause cancer. Instead, this genius walks up to the fence and, standing on the tracks, screams over to his buddy. Meanwhile, the train's a-comin', but this guy seems to have other priorities.

My feelings on the whole matter are let the guy get creamed by the train and hand his pieces a Darwin Award afterwards. But that would probably make my train late, and it was really freaking humid outside, so I was glad a few good samaritans yelled at the guy and got him to amble off the tracks. But seriously, I bet if you were smoking near that guy, he'd give you a weird look like, dude, do you want to get lung cancer or something?

Now we've got these loquacious girls on their cell phones, and something needs to be done mitigate all these unlimited anytime minutes and free text and photo messaging and nationwide wireless networks. Like leaving a chunk of uranium in the phone. Then you wouldn't want to have the thing clipped onto your belt.