It's been 45 years since the infamous Milgram experiment found that ordinary people were perfectly willing to electrocute total strangers for no other reason than that they were told by someone in a lab coat that they could.  And for the first time since, the New York Times reports, the experiment has been replicated, with nearly identical results.

The Times editorial board laments that despite vast cultural change, "it appears that ordinary Americans are about as willing to blindly follow orders to inflict pain on an innocent stranger as they were four decades ago."  Not to piss on your parade, but: well, duh.  In fact, these days it's worse!  It doesn't even take a lab coat anymore.  Any jackass could come along and tell you to do something and odds are you'd do it. 

I was having a coffee at my local Au Bon Pain on the square here the other morning.  There were only a couple of other people in my section of the restaurant, one a representative of the town contingent, the other of the gown camp.  The latter was a man roughly my age, maybe a little older, with meticulously tousled medium-length locks and moddish eyeglasses, his laptop at the ready, the perfect picture of meta — engrossed in some very important intellectual endeavor. 

The local, on the other hand, looked to be a retired Joe The Plumber with nothing better to do than while away the morning next to the free sample tray with his complimentary copy of Metro, staring and blinking at passersby.  Every couple of minutes he would stand and go to the free sample tray and sheepishly select no more than three quarter-sandwiches to take back to his table.  Like he was at a reception or an art opening, just nibbling on hors d'oeuvres and people-watching.

Every so often the Professor would sniffle or stifle a cough.  Joe The Plumber would pop another hors d'oeuvre from the samples tray and stare at him and blink.  Finally, as the Professor was stifling a particularly violent coughing spell, the Plumber yells across the restaurant, in the tone of the ever-helpful stranger: "Don't stifle it!  Open yuh mouth!  Let it out!  Everybody's sick this time uh year anyway!"

Not only was the brash accent a shock in the quiet of the introverted mid-morning crowd, but the advice was jarring as well.  I know what you're thinking: there was an acerbic wit behind it, but I assure you there was no hint of sarcasm in the Plumber's words of wisdom. This was true-life, old-fashioned good-natured bad advice.

More shocking still: the Professor took it! I realized to my horror that a few words hollered across the room from a total stranger with clearly no medical training, only the most rudimentary of social skills, and likely no job, had undone forty-plus years of socialization in someone who probably has no fewer than three degrees and is expected to mix with adults on a daily basis. 

The Professor, having received permission to spread his germs with impunity was now making no attempt to stifle his cough, or even to cover his mouth.  A few words from Joe The Plumber was all it took for him to utterly abandon the absolute minimum of civility.

The scenario would have been impossible between the Prof and I, because neither of us would have been able to carry it off without sarcasm slipping in and ruining the moment.  It would have turned testy pretty quick, I'm afraid.  I'm not sure why it's so difficult for pod people to talk to each other — could be a little like running into compatriots abroad.  You travel six thousands miles, you want to mix with the natives, not run into someone from your home town. 

Yes, those who've enjoyed all the privileges of a sheltered existence and have grown used to falsely elevated levels of self-esteem do like to encounter some "real people" out on the street occasionally.  Not too many — there's definitely a tipping point — and usually in a controlled setting, like behind a counter or on the other side of a glass partition.  The city is like a magical zoo with human exhibits!  But don't get too close — these critters bite!

When two metas are together in one room, it can get awkward, because my meta and your meta might not jibe.  It's better to try to arrange a scenario that allows for the illusion of spontaneity without the risk.  The saddest instances of this are sexual, of course. 

There's a tall, blond, ridiculously good looking 22 year old who goes to my gym who has some kind of locker room fantasy he wants to act out, and he's found me online (they don't call the site Manhunt for nothin', it turns out), and has been trying to arrange a locker room tryst for months.  Won't come to my place, doesn't want me to come to his.  "I'll be waiting for you in the sauna from nine to ten," is his plan.

While I'm flattered, I can't imagine coordinating something like that.  In the pre-internet, pre-cell phone days of my storied youth, things just somehow managed to happen all by themselves.  The younger generation, the first incipient transhuman manga generation, does have some funny ideas when it comes to hooking up. 

Just for the record, I don't go to the gym looking for it.  None of this:

If I wanted that kind of incessant, futile distraction, I'd join the South End BSC.  No, when I'm at the gym I'm in The Zone.  Happily, the crowd at the Davis Square BSC is very well-behaved on the whole.

The only time anything came close to happening in my current gym sauna, I didn't even know it until a couple days later when a fellow I'd walked in on sitting in the sauna without the heat on hunted me down online, too, and started chatting me up.  It only then occurred to me that he had been sitting in the sauna at room temperature for a reason.  At the time I thought he was just a bonehead. 

Sadly, our chat ended up confirming my initial judgment, as he spun out his fantasy of what might have been had I stuck around after resetting the timer on the sauna.  He banged on a bit about the myriad ways I could have worshipped and served him.  He was certainly not all that. Finally I was like: "dude, you don't need a man, you need a Porta Muff."

I guess you can get a lot more in the long-run out of fantasy than you can out of reality.  I mean, once you actually do something, it's done.  I suppose you can still think about how you could have done it differently, but then that's called regret, and if you never actually do it, you at least can't regret having done it. 

Of course, these days, the lines are ever blurrier between reality and fantasy.  There's been another one of those memoirs that's turned out to be a fabrication.  Oprah needs to just go ahead and start her own genre.  Or maybe it's true: The past is fiction.  Even the present is sketchy.

Twentysomethings seem especially reality-averse.  They want to be sure everything is perfectly clear before they risk exposure, or worse — far worse — rejection.  I don't know, but in the old days, the risk was part of the thrill of the thing. Part of being in the moment. Part of being present in the present.  Remember the repertoire of subtle moves that revealed your desires, and when responded to in kind, slowly intensified until desires became intentions and intentions acts.  Nowadays body language almost seems like a dying language, as quaint and antiquated as the old hanky code.

Frankly, while flirting is fun, public sex doesn't interest me overmuch nowadays.  And I have never been a big fan of sex in the sauna.  It's too stuffy, and I always feel as if I'll suffocate before I get to the good part.  Truth is, I'm not a big talker in the sauna either.  I have even less interest in chatting with most people than I do in having sex with them.  At least you come away from sex with a sense of accomplishment.  Small talk for its own sake in certain situations is a social necessity, but in close quarters with sweaty naked men it's not the first thing that leaps to mind. Unfortunately, neither is sex.  There's that line between life and porn again. 

Nonetheless, this time of year, there's just about nothing better than a good hot sauna after a workout.  I've been fortunate to have the sauna to myself most days I've wanted to use it, owing to my hours.  But the other morning I happened to walk in on a lad I had noticed earlier in the free weights who had a very sympathetic face.  The body of a walrus, more or less, it turns out, but that's his karma, and his concern, not mine.  I was just relieved that I would not be any more hot and bothered in the sauna than I absolutely needed to be. 

He had said "hello" to me when I entered, and I had greeted him, but there didn't seem to be any subtext.  I took a seat, but kept my towel on.  Settled in and relaxed.  We went about our separate business — he read his magazine, and I stretched — in silence for five or ten minutes before he — inexplicably, I thought — struck up a conversation of sorts.

"It's a nice change from the cold outside, isn't it?" he said.

I suppose it's possible he just wanted to have an amiable, manly chat about the weather.  But we were doing so well in silence for so long.  Still, I couldn't just ignore him, could I? 

So, continuing my stretches, I replied: "yeah—feels good" —  to get some stretching in, I meant — "after being chained to my desk for the last two days" — on account of the weather keeping me indoors, I meant.

We sat there a minute in silence, wherein he seemed to be puzzling over my reply, and then, with obvious irritation he snapped: "I was talking about the weather."

We returned to our silence, and a minute or two later he got up and left. 

Some people are so demanding. 

But come on.  If you're going to strike up a coversation with a stranger, you get what you get.   Same if you perpetrate one of those so-called random acts of kindness everybody's always waxing poetic about.  Don't expect everything to go as planned.  The most disappointing is when you do something everyone's always griping that other people never do, and then no one seems to appreciate the fact that you just did.  Just count yourself lucky you're not hooked up to electrodes, and the rest of them aren't in possession of electorshock generators.

I'm a big fan of giving up your seat to someone who needs it more than you do.  Thing is, that's a judgment call, innit?  Very subjective.  I mean, even when it seems rather obvious, you can end up losing your seat for no good reason. 

On a recent commute, I watched from my hanging strap as a young office worker did the right thing and gave up her seat to a young Latina mother with what looked to me to be a two, two-and-a-half year old kid.  The mother took the seat — so far so good — and I think everbody thought the kid would end up on her lap.  He ended up on the floor. ON THE FLOOR.  OF A SUBWAY CAR.  On a cold, gunky, slushy day, no less.  At rush hour. 

Sometimes you wish you had one of those watches — like in that show from the '70s — that could take you back in time, just, like, a minute.  That's really all you need.  You could avoid a lot of these situations with a magic watch, couldn't you?  Barring that, the T could just take out all the seating in their subway cars.  Hey, wait a minute —

One night last week I was taking the T home from work.  I got on at Park and managed to get a seat after a couple stops in one of the cars that still has them.  There was a free seat to my right and at the next stop a skinny, well-heeled, bloodless white woman in her sixties, I'd say, took it, and not without some fanfare.  She was tastefully attired and looked cultured, if a little poignantly made up, poor dear. At some point women of a certain age start to resemble men in drag, don't they? 

My new neighbor had a super-sized black bag, and after making more of a to-do about taking her seat than seemed entirely necessary, she made a big production of digging in her bag, took out the latest New Yorker, and started turning pages expansively.

I had contracted to my travel size, and was perfectly content to occupy the space allotted what was once considered sufficient for a normal, civilized-sized adult.  I had cracked open my T reading — the very funny David Rakoff's Don't Get Too Comfortable.  It's a real shame that David Sedaris' stuff has so overshadowed other worthy gay writers, like Rakoff.  Rakoff's work is less precious, more expansive — it's certainly hard to be more solipsistic than Sedaris — and has a drier, worldlier wit.  During my evening commute I found this passage particulalry apropos: "We are great sloshing, suppurating bags of wet, prone to rupture.  Mortal messes waiting to happen." 

The grande dame ruffled her feathers a bit more, elbows out, but finally everyone settled down and settled in.  I was actually thinking I was lucky she was a skinny one, because nine times out of ten if I get a seat, I end up wedged between Gargantua and Pantagruel. As comfortable as I was at this point, when an older gentleman who looked to have had a rough day got on at the next stop, I offered my seat to him.  he declined.  I said, "you sure?" he said "thank you, but no." And that's when the skinny bitch kicked me. 

And then she kicked me again.

I was utterly bewildered.  I could not imagine the reason for this assault.  I looked down at my feet.  They were, literally, three and a half inches apart.  Not exactly sprawling.  But she was not letting up.  In fact, as I looked down at it, she started kicking my foot more aggressively. 

I turned to her, and said, "are you seizuring, or can I help you with something?"

"It's just —" she huffed and puffed. "I can't — I need — my balance."

The old skinny bitch with a wide stance routine, eh? 

The train was pretty crowded and, frankly, it might have been much worse for her.  I could have been a sprawler, in which case she would not have gotten a seat in the first place.  I could have been a two-seater, with an ass the size of a steamer trunk.  But I happen to be a skinny white guy who'd demonstrated a propensity for gratuitous kindess just now. 

We don't like to think of old people in general, but old ladies especially, as being bullies, but I have met my share of them.  I'm not talking about sweet old ladies who are forced to get medieval on your ass because you're not treating them with respect.  I'm talking about predatory types, who size up and seek out suitable strangers to get their evil bitch on with.  They will generally choose someone they can see is too decent to strike back, and then unleash all their old lady rage on them.

I feel it's important to minimize the probability of conflict in public places, like subway trains.  But if you're really looking for trouble, and I can oblige, I will.  That New Yorker told me all I needed to know even before she started kicking me. 

She was surprised that I had turned, fixed her in the eye and addressed her directly.  I think she figured I would crinkle up and shrink back further.  Maybe her previous forays into terrorizing decent people had empowered her to think that she could chase them off by kicking and babbling at them, leaving her unecumbered to turn the pages of her New Yorker, razor-sharp elbows free of impediments.

I pointed to the partition in the three-seat section, and told her: "look, that's all the space you get.  This is mine."

"B-b-but...my... balance," she babbled.

I pointed out that my feet were about as close together as they could be without my legs being crossed.

"I have testicles," I told her. "I'm allowed that much." 

She harrumphed and snapped her New Yorker and left me alone.  And, amazingly, despite not being able to gird herself to the spot sufficiently for her taste her bony ass was not flung from her seat.  She managed to stay fixed to her spot without much drama for the rest of her journey.

People have needs.  I understand that.  They have needs that only strangers can meet sometimes.  This can be because only strangers can meet certain needs, or because they have driven away everyone else in their lives who might be able to. It's no secret that strangers are perfect when you need to punish or persecute someone.  But just as with the Milgram Experiment, the mystery is not that people will do nasty, even unspeakable things to strangers if given the go-ahead.  The mystery is why some few of them won't.