She said, "Gordie baby, I know exactly what you mean."

As the 21 pulled into the Chicago transit station today on the way home, we had to stop and wait a few minutes behind some other buses, which is normal. It's a transit station. It is crawling with buses. And as we wait, I glance out the window on the other side of the bus and notice a man doing a walk Mr. Rickets would envy, all jerky and jangly and awkwardly elastic, like a rubber marionette on a caffeine buzz, or maybe a meth addict after a twelve hour yoga marathon. And he was in a hurry. He was zinging along as fast as his silly putty legs and windmilling arms would take him. It wasn't really anything you could call "zinging along" under normal circumstances, but when I first saw him I assumed he had some kind of advanced form of cerebral palsy, which made his speed relatively impressive. And then he bobbleheaded closer to the bus and I realized he was actually just unbelievably drunk, which made it even more of an accomplishment.

He jangled past the bus, legs flailing along in an unsteady goosestep, and made a beeline for the enclosed waiting area of the station. It took him a few tries but he managed to open the door twice (after pulling on the push door for too long, he lost his balance, fell against it, regained his balance again for a moment after it pushed open and then lost it again in the other direction, and by the time he'd figured out how to stand up the door had closed and he had to start all over) and stumble inside. And the next five seconds passed very memorably indeed.

There are moments when you glance at something and don't catch anything in the glance. The temperature on the TCF building marquee flickers out of view just half a moment before you register it and you have to wait for it to show up again, for example. Or a car with a funny bumper sticker cruises past too fast to read it all. All too often, you can't catch what you want to see in a moment.

Alternatively, there are moments where you take in far more than you ever, ever wanted to. Five seconds isn't nearly enough time to check out the cute boy in aisle two. Five seconds is, however, ample time to see an extremely drunk man unzip his pants, start to pee a fountain into the garbage can in the bus station, then lose his fight against gravity and s-l-o-w-l-y topple over backwards, still peeing, to land flat on his back on the floor and continue to pee straight up into the air. And all this as you are turning your head to look away.

Time is funny like that.