It happened again just yesterday. Plink-plink. Nail clipping. Male, late teens. Window seat, backward facing, next to one of his friends and perpendicular to another. They didn’t seem to mind. They must not have read my blog entry.

Only eight days had passed. It had been at least ten since the previous occurrence. There’s no predicting when this will next occur, because I don’t have enough data to set up a clipping matrix of any statistical significance.

But it will happen again, yes. Maybe that sun-rising certainty is the good to be hidden beneath this goopy irritation. Maybe these entries belonged on my old blog. Maybe I haven’t changed all that much since then. Maybe.

It’s disgusting.

Today was the fourth time in the last three weeks – since I announced it aloud and brought more of it to fruition – that my attention on the subway in the morning, normally hard to grasp, has been yanked out of its daydream by its ankle and also by the short, heavy, high-pitched *snap*…..*snap*……..*snap* of some inconsiderate, nasty, boundaryless freak clipping her – or his – fingernails on the underground.

Now, I have a pretty high tolerance for what others consider disgusting – I am a male in my mid-twenties with rent to pay, after all – but this monotonous dull thud is like Chinese water torture to me, if the drops were…slowly after…one another…into my…sideways ear – wow, not unlike King Hamlet sitting in his Danish garden. I put up with the voluminous on the trains, the bastards who put their feet up, the insecure guys who hold the two vertical poles in the middle of the train as if they own the train (it’s not like he’s in the Lords of Hell), I put up with all of it and everything and for longer than most of you reading this, through three boroughs of New York.

I deserve either of two things, I’ve realized – an award, for holding my temper, merely cracking my knuckles and gritting my teeth – or a citation, for letting this filth run amok in what amounts to the only “clean” area of the subway that isn’t used as a toilet by some mammal more frequently than twice a day. I may deserve those, but I know exactly what I’ll get – what I’ve always gotten, which is someone clipping his or her fingernails on the subway about twice a month, snapping gleeful and unfettered by social restriction by the rest of us too thoughtful to let them know how sickening they are and how their sickness is so utterly evident to the rest of us, even those less perceptive than I see myself.