Alien Invaders!!

Train rides can be so relaxing ... until one person calls another an "alien" and a brawl breaks out. I'm taking the 4:05 p.m. Amtrak from Washington, D.C., back to Philadelphia, barely making the gate after swallowing a $10 vegetable wrap and picking up the latest issue of Esquire -- a mammoth of a magazine. If you smacked someone in the face with it, it would probably knock out a few teeth. Anyway.

So I find my seat next to the window. Ten seconds later the fracas begins. An older gentleman with an ill-fitting suit and scraggly salt-and-pepper beard barks at the passenger behind me. I can't see him. The bearded man complains that the unseen man behind me is taking too long doing something -- presumably moving out of the aisle, stowing his bags or some other unforgivable sin in need of immediate reprisal. Mr. Invisible says something about "stealing our land." It gets interesting. Have I mentioned how much I love trains?

The bluster continues. Something about "parasite blankets." Then Mr. Beard lobs the nuclear-tipped missile: "Are you an alien?" Mr. Invisible loses it and screams, "YOU'RE THE ALIEN!!" I start digging in my bag for my pocket knife, praying as always that I won't have to use it. I have visions of stepping between the two and providing the calming voice of reason and, like River Phoenix's character in "Stand By Me," taking a knife to the throat and bleeding to death on the dusty floor of a train car. Everyone around me stares at the two, still arguing and accusing each other of wrongs committed long ago but left hanging out there like wet pants on a clothesline.

And then it's over. Their angry words are replaced by the chirp of metal on metal as the train comes to life: gears shifting, wheels moving, oily machines doing their jobs. No bloodshed. No fists thrown. No intervention by a well-meaning Samaritan. Both men find their seats and shut the @#$% up. I put my knife away, trading it for Esquire and my iPod. You can almost smell the tension dissipating.

But I'm left wondering what caused it all. Surely it wasn't a simple matter of one person getting in another's way. It was merely the final degree that pushed one to his internal boiling point, causing a chain reaction in another. One was unhappy about something much bigger, much more important: career, family, marriage, health, sex (frequency, content, etc.) -- life in general. He snapped. Luckily there were no weapons involved.

We're all a few degrees, a few straws, a few nasty words removed from snapping. Everyone's unhappy about something. What's amazing is that more seemingly simple confrontations don't end in carnage more often. But when it does happen -- a school shooting, an alcohol-fueled car wreck, some other form of self-sabotage -- people can't or don't want to believe it. But we've all been there, close to the edge. And once that edge has been cleared, most times there's no coming back.