E-Mail This Article to a Friend Notes from the underground (continued) BY CHRIS WRIGHT

12:30 p.m., Ashmont. Stalls sell phone cards, hats, framed posters of Malcolm X, fruit. A pigeon with crap and feathers clumped on its foot limps toward the Ashmont Hot Dog cart. Me too. I sit to eat my Italian sausage. "I gotta see if I can get me a hot dog or something," says a man who bears a remarkable resemblance to the pigeon. "I’m hungry." A guy with dreadlocks approaches an older woman sitting nearby. "You remember me, right?" he says. "No," she replies.

12:45 p.m., Red Line inbound. As the train waits at Ashmont, a guy jumps off to go buy a paper, leaving his bag on the seat. A teenage boy looks at the bag, looks at the open door, looks at me, and makes a pshhht! sound. We both laugh.

1:05 p.m., JFK/UMass. Fat can look good on people. The man standing down the platform from me is proof of it. He is massive. There is a perfect arc from the top of his head to the tops of his thighs. He is an egg, but a well-dressed egg: pale-blue short-sleeve shirt, open, over a white T-shirt, navy pants. Nearby, a Whitey Bulger clone wears a shirt that says GOT WOOD?

2 p.m., Braintree. I’m not blaming the $3 Italian sausage I ate earlier, but now I find myself hobbling alongside Braintree’s terrifying autobahns. Bickford’s! A quick 30-yard dash to the men’s room, then back on the rails.

2:25 p.m., Red Line inbound. A dozing drunk guy, bottle in his lap, burps loudly. We cross the river. A goth girl with straight black hair carries a bag with skull-and-crossbones pins neatly arrayed. She doesn’t look up once. A woman works a finger over her lips, as if applying a never-ending coat of lip balm.

2:45 p.m., Alewife. There are three people sitting in this car, and two of us are writing furiously. The trains are getting messier. Already there is a carpet of discarded papers: KIDS LEFT IN SUV DIE.

3:10 p.m., Park Street. Ten hours of this dry, stale air. I am gripped by the sudden urge to pick my nose. An impossibility, of course.

3:20 p.m., Green D Line westbound. There is actually a clause in the no-look rule on the T. It comes into effect when people start doing things, like dropping a paper, or rummaging in a bag. When something like this happens, everyone watches. We are like cattle that way — dumbly curious. As I write, a guy peers over my shoulder. Tut, I think. Tut-tut. But some people are less averse to being looked at than others. A thin, sick-looking guy gets on. He has greasy hair, a creased face, and a surprisingly nice-looking tote bag on his shoulder. He mumbles for a while, then spits on the floor. "Ugh!" I say, loud enough for him to hear. He doesn’t seem to notice.

3:40 p.m., Reservoir. Reservoir? All I see is a warehouse, from which emanates the sound of a crackly PA: "Roy! Roy! Office!" The T is filled with misnamed stations. Wonderland, Cedar Grove, Oak Grove, Wood Island, Valley Road, Stony Brook. Most of these stops are not exactly the kinds of places that would have inspired Wordsworth. At Reservoir, even the sparrows are pissy.

3:50 p.m., Green D Line westbound. I’ve seen some bad clothes today, but the prize for Worst-Dressed Commuter may go to the guy wearing black cotton pants with tomatoes printed on them. The prize for worst reading material, meanwhile, goes to the guy reading a Star Trek novel — and blocking an empty seat while doing so. The award for the most likes per sentence goes to the short plump girl with the lip stud.

4:15 p.m., Riverside. Astonishingly, the guy with the tomato pants alights from the trolley with a bunch of good ol’ boys I’d been listening to. I’m not sure where they were from, but they had accents like stroke victims. "Ah dowayn’t hayve the mehrney," said one of them, "to geet m’ wayell dreeyelled." Maybe I was too hard on the sparrows. Maybe it’s me who’s pissy. And why shouldn’t I be? I cannot feel my ass. My eyes are like two jalapeño-stuffed olives in an extra-dry martini. A martini. I don’t think any fluids have passed my lips in six hours.

4:20 p.m., Green D Line eastbound. A woman slathers skin cream on her arms and shoulders. Before long, she is obscured by the figure of a remarkably wrinkled old lady in a sun hat and floral-print shirt. Two girls, maybe 17 years old, giggle and poke each other. One of them is much better-looking than the other. I wonder if that ever causes tension.

5:05 p.m., Government Center. That’s it, I’m going for a pee.

5:35 p.m., Blue Line northbound. There’s nothing like having your arm clamped between a large man’s buttocks. And this guy is very large, maybe larger than the guy at JFK. Someone smells. Maybe it’s me. The sight of a woman unwrapping a convenience-store pound cake breaks my heart. There’s orange linoleum on the floor. A woman with crinkly white hair is looking at me funny.

6:10 p.m., Wonderland. As far as I can gather, 75 percent of T riders wear hospital blues. One in three uses a cell phone.

6:20 p.m., Blue Line southbound. The guy opposite me is the spitting image of Albert Finney. I decide to stave off lunacy by playing a game with myself: Spot the Look-Alike. Over the next few hours, I see John Denver, F. Murray Abraham, Julianna Margulies, Daisy Fuentes, Ice Cube, Larry Hagman, and another John Denver, who is fiddling with the wattle on his neck. I cannot tear my eyes away from the wattle, which is too bad, because there is a lot to look at from the window of a Blue Line train out here. Trees. Houses. Cars.

6:30 p.m., Suffolk Downs. Second spit of the day. A great big ptooey from the mouth of a man with a Benjamin Franklin hairdo and teeth like a garden rake. Bless him.

7:10 p.m., Bowdoin. Roberto Benigni!

7:25 p.m., Park Street. Please.

7:35 p.m., Green C Line westbound. There’s something awful about subway tunnels. It’s not just because they’re caked with ancient filth. It’s a sense that we’re seeing something we’re not supposed to, like the inside of an elevator shaft, or the inside of a head. As the walls of the tunnel streak by, the train rumbles — a sound that will no doubt stay with me long after I’ve closed my eyes tonight. If I ever do. Two guys mock fight each other. This can only get worse.

7:55 p.m., Cleveland Circle. There’s a guy with red flip-flops, a diminishing white stripe along the sole — like the Starsky & Hutch car. A woman with too many teeth. A cinema I haven’t visited in 15 years. Whoop-de-do.

8:10 p.m., Green C Line eastbound. The most impressive celebrity look-alike of the night: a young Bruce Springsteen. Dead ringer. With Bruce is a girl with a toilet brush of bright-red hair — like the woman in Run Lola Run. "Just sit," Bruce says to Lola. "Go somewhere and sit."

8:40 p.m., Downtown Crossing. Zzzzzzzz. Wha ...?

8:55 p.m., Orange Line southbound. There’s a party atmosphere developing. "I bought him a thong," says a young woman to her friend. "He didn’t appreciate it." An older woman — possibly drunk, definitely with terrible split ends — checks out her reflection, stumbles, bonks her forehead on the window, and gets off at the next stop.

9:20 p.m., Forest Hills. Another bathroom break, during which I slip and accidentally pour a pint of Newcastle Brown down my throat.

9:50 p.m., Orange Line northbound. I am not mugged, cudgeled, shot, stabbed, slandered, or any of the other things that are supposed to happen on the Orange Line at night. I am, however, at grave risk of slipping into a coma, or I would be if it weren’t for the three Irish lads having a bellowing competition. One of them, when he isn’t bellowing, bites the skin off his fingers.

10:10 p.m., Park Street. I check my T map, which is such an innocuous thing to do it really should raise suspicion. After all, I’ve been through this station 400 times now — I’m officially a loiterer. According to the mottled Xs on the map, I’ve been everywhere and back again. So, for the next two and a half hours, I visit random stops, travel random lines. For the most part, my notes give way to doodles.

10:55 p.m., Green D Line westbound. A beautiful woman, in her mid 20s, emerges as a late candidate in the worst-dressed stakes. Her blouse has this ruffled-bunched front that looks like an unmade bed. This doesn’t stop the mustachioed guy in the Miller Lite baseball cap from staring at the point where her breasts should be, his expression a mixture of desire and defeat.

11:20 p.m., Green B Line eastbound. By now, even the most mundane sights have taken on a dreamlike quality. Bra straps are adjusted — ooh. Pizza is eaten — aah. A scruffy old guy wearing a pair of leather driving gloves walks on with a mop in his hand — a mop! My heart is beating like the opening bars of "For Those About To Rock." It’s adrenaline, I think, trying to trick my body into thinking that it isn’t on the verge of death. "I peed on my shoe," says a young guy, eliciting much laughter.

11:55 p.m., Red Line inbound. A tattooed, dreadlocked, redheaded guy opens a beer with one hand and works a cell phone with the other. Another guy looks through a bag of clothes while rapping along to the music on his headphones. Mid-rap, he yawns.

12:05 a.m., Green E Line westbound. We’re down to the staggerers now, the gigglers, the snoozers. "Copley is a very special station," announces the driver over the intercom. "It was here I ran into the back of another train for the first time." He pauses. "Just kidding." He pauses again. "It wasn’t the first time." I am the only person on the train, I think, who doesn’t find this amusing.

12:35 a.m., Green E Line eastbound. The last ride of the day. I am so tired I could weep. Then something remarkable happens. A guy gets up out of his seat, walks over to a young woman, and hands her a scrap of paper. "Would you like to have lunch with me?" Just like that. "Well, um, ah," the woman says. By the look on her face, I can tell she’ll never call.