A Man Who Has Clinical Tourette's and Must Still Ride the Subway

A middle-aged man who has just spit his orangina soda onto another man next to him without apology. Next to him a young couple is talking and he is punctuating their conversation with low growls and barking sounds.

His hands are trembling.

A man who is going to spend his whole life getting beaten up for spitting orangina, being ridiculed for barking. A man who spends his entire life suppressing the most basic urges in the world, the urges to punctuate silence, cut neckties, to trip the elderly, to fart in elevators. To throw snowballs at police. To laugh and to cry. Spending his entire life suppressing these and all the other urges.

And in this, it's clear that Tourette's is a difference of threshold, not initiative. Quantity not quality. Different from everyone else only because of the effort required, in the effort to suppress the same goddamn thoughts floating through every head in the subway.

A Man Who Has Catalogued All of His Financial Transactions Going Back to 1998

A man who has entered every one of his financial transactions from the last seven years into Quicken. Every taxi receipt, every movie stub, every ATM fee. Every metrocard, birthday cake, hotel room, everything that leaves a trace.

He is single he is 35 years old. He is calculating how much he has spent on every date he has ever had, to determine whether it was less expensive than visiting a prostitute. It is not.

He is calculating every wedding he has attended, every engagement gift, every baby toy, he is wondering how he will recoup the money he has spent on other people's happiness.