Avocado's number

I suppose I should be thankful that Chicago isn't Washington, where the price to pay for what has to be the nation's cleanest subway is a set of ridiculously overbearing transit cops who treat 12-year-olds and pregnant women like threats to national security for, respectively, eating a french fry on a station platform and talking too loudly on a cell phone. But sometimes I see people on the CTA and wish a cop would just bust in and take them down. I thought the guy eating a Corner Bakery salad on the train the other day was going to be my champion for the year, but that was before yesterday on the bus.

I was sitting in the back row of seats. This woman is sitting "across" from me (in the back right sideways-facing group of seats). She pulls out - and I swear to you that I am not making any of the following up - a plastic knife, a plastic spoon, and an avocado.

Yeah.

First she uses the knife to cut the avocado into sections around the pit. Then she starts scraping pieces out with the spoon and eating them. And by eating, I mean "flinging at her mouth with a motion that made it look like she was trying to hack out her own uvula." I may never see anyone with an uglier eating style.

Eventually, she eats the top half of the avocado. But before she can go to town on the bottom part, she pulls out a packet of thousand island dressing. For real. And proceeds to pour it gingerly over the remaining avocado half, and then spooning out and eating that part.

I guarantee you this woman thinks she was eating healthy.

At some point, the pit - which she left in place even though you can't eat it - went flying and rolled down the aisle. She gave chase and changed seats in the process, dropping the knife on the floor where she had been sitting. Shortly after taking up residence in her new seat just shy of the stairs, a piece of avocado made its way to the floor of the aisle as well.

A little while later she moved up a bit further, to a forward-facing pair of seats just shy of the middle of the bus (this was a double-long bus with the accordion middle). When the bus eventually got to her stop, she stumbled to her feet, spilling something on the floor in the process. As she got off the bus, I saw - she was drinking from an open beer.

This probably explains the whole thing. Considering that a single Michelob (this woman's beverage of choice) is nowhere near enough to get anyone stumbling-from-your-seat drunk, she was probably half in the bag by the time she boarded in the first place, which no doubt led her to think that her little avocado shenanigans actually made perfect sense.

So, let's recap. By the time this woman got off the bus, she had left reminders of her presence in three separate spots in the aisle - the plastic knife at the back, the avocado piece just short of the stairs, and the beer spill up near the middle. I wouldn't want to be handcuffed for eating a candy bar, but if anyone deserved to spend a few hours in jail over eating on public transportation, it was our drunken, avocado-loving friend here. I suppose it could have been worse - she could have been eating durian - but among produce readily available in this country I can think of few things more ridiculous or annoying, save perhaps a grapefruit.