The C8 Gets Stranger all the Time

So I'm on the bus on my way to campus right now and for once I'm not bogged down with work that I'm frantically trying to finish on my bus ride, so I have time to tell you about the lunatics on my bus.
Typically, my fellow commuters are fairly normal people. One of the pleasures of public transit, however, is the total nutjobs I sometimes encounter. I try to refrain from using this forum to mock people who seem truly disturbed, but some people are fair game, either because they seem mentally stable but have just made odd choices or their eccentricities are harmless and amusing. Like the guy who claimed he saw Michael Jackson's ghost in the cemetery (before he was actually dead, I mean...not that I think MJ is moonwalking in the local cemetery even now) or the woman who was sporting a Frosty the Snowman sweater last week. I mean, even if we agree that Frosty is a seasonal winter thing and not a Christmas thing, it's still two months too early. Or, hey, the guys who got on the bus right this minute who are apparently celebrating Odd Hat Day. One has a baseball cap with a couple of bird feathers awkwardly attached to it (think Fagan in Oliver!) and I swear the other one is wearing a tea cozy on his head, ala Snatch.
Anyway, those people are all quirky but sort of lovable. Even the guy last week who was loudly planning Jose's Getting Out of Jail Cookout over his cellphone had good intentions. But last week I encountered Total Jackass Crazies. And this story I'm sharing just because I want you to be as outraged as I was. (In my head, anyway. I'm not really one to start bus confrontations.) Anyway, these two guys were older white men, dressed in ill fitting business suits. They were carrying a bag of supposedly real gold and silver jewelry that, if I understood their discussion correctly, they'd stolen from "the old Korean ladies" and this was completely acceptable because of the finders-keepers rule. They were then attempting to sell this jewelry on the bus to unsuspecting women who didn't realize that before they got on the bus the guys had been marking hundred dollar prices on the jewelry so they could then say "This was two hundred dollars but I'll sell it to you for thirty!" amazingly, a couple of women actually bought stuff! At first I was like, who buys jewelry on the bus?! But then I realized that a lot of my fellow commuters are recent immigrants from Latin American countries where it's much more common for people to pedal items anywhere: buses, street corners, restaurants, whatever. And these jackass con artists are aware of this and preying specifically on Hispanic immigrants. At one point one of them even said, "We need to go down to X, it's full of Latinas, they'll buy all this crap and if we liquidate by noon we can catch the bus to the racetrack." It wasn't even just the fact that they were cheating people that bothered me. It was the things the one guy was saying. I was so appalled that I started taking notes in the book I was reading so I could tell Penn about it in detail later. Here are just some of the things the guy said during the thirty minutes I was on the bus with him:
"All fat women are fat because they eat their emotions. They can't get laid so they get their sexual satisfaction through eating and then they get even fatter and no one will sleep with them. It's a vicious cycle. Look at Oprah, why does someone with as much as she has need to be fat? It's because she's sexually frustrated."
"I know a coke addict that will buy this stuff. She'll do anything. Sometimes I feel like I'm taking advantage, but that's her problem."
"Why is everything called MLK around here? The guy is dead!"
"You can't hang out around high schools because this country says that's illegal. But colleges are okay!"
"We can't go sell in X County. They're all stuck up Jew bitches over there who can afford to pay full price. They don't need us over there." (For the record, I live in X County, so you can see Jackass's assumptions are TOTALLY valid.
And, finally as we pulled onto campus, Jackass goes "Look at these college students now. It's nothing like it used to be. Now it's all about diversity." And I stood up to exit the bus and the guy behind me, who happened to be black, also stood up to exit. And Jackass goes, "See, look at that! There's no reason those two should be getting off the bus together. I've been to some colleges, and I know how it's supposed to be, and it's not supposed to be like this."
The guy and I just got off the bus and said nothing, but in retrospect I really wish I'd kicked Jackass in the balls on my way up the aisle.
Sometimes the only way I get through these situations is by reminding myself that his generation is dying off, and hopefully there will be less and less people like him every generation. I can hope, anyway.