22-December-2009 5:54AM

I walk the three-quarters of a mile necessary to intersect the “backup bus” since missing the usual route by two minutes. Things don’t go well, for right as I am set to cross the street to the stop that very public transit vehicle careens by and is eventually swallowed up by the elongated night’s air; its distant diesel’s rear the only items afoul of its supposed existence.

I walk the additional mile to mile and a quarter of a mile necessary to intersect a route headed where I need to get to get to, that being downtown to transfer to yet another shuttle of sorts I am passed by multiple semi-tractor trailers that make me think twice about traversing this road’s shoulder as I do, watching one such veer over the path by a nice foot or two up ahead over the shoulder’s line.
I finally make it, arriving at the same exact time as a short hooked-nosed woman with dyed and frosted thinning hair and the body shape of a blueberry. She possesses big large round glasses reminiscent of the decade of the 1970’s. She doesn’t like to walk on the grass, or any other surface of organic flora evidenced that she travels around the long way on her thick stubby legs to the stop.

We both are met with a bus going to the University of Washington. The hooked-nosed woman does nothing; I shake my head in the negative to the driver. That first bus moves on, and another follows. This second is the one I need, and the hooked-nosed woman as well. She wedges herself forcefully to get in front of me even though at first she hangs back in avid hesitation.

The hooked-nosed woman takes her time paying the fare, fishing out rumpled bills and a smattering of jangling coins. She even teeters on a decision to take a transfer offered to her by the outstretched hand of the driver, and then finally does after much ridiculous indecision. It is as if her whole existence was made up of one tentative blunder after another.

No matter.

I sit down, open my jacket to let the built-up heat from the walk out, and write in the present tense, mostly the indicative, about this rather random facet.

17-December-2009 5:01PM

Entering like a twisted exercise on intellectual regurgitation, the “bus book club trio” discuss their “unoriginalities” under guarded pretense. One of the members of which is the spread-eagle backpack lady, realized without surprise. As an auto-defense mechanism, I place a pair of ear buds against my auditory sensors, and piped in Zeppelin’s Tea for One, for I cannot bring myself to listen to the “bus book club trio’s” stunted discussion on endless restatement of what is being read or what was read again.

They are basically the only three carrying on a discussion that will in all likelihood be irrevocably forgotten in a manner of a mere week if that, since other books shall be scanned, analyzed to the nth degree, and passages recalled to make points and postulations that require much furrowing of brows and thoughtful scratching of chins. Oh yes, those outward gestures especially are so required for this type of palaver, above all the former which possesses the ability to mask the maximum amount of fervent patronizing that would otherwise be conveyed.

14-December-2009 6:21AM

Black ice smears itself across roughened asphalt, interfering with the taken-for-granted traction that vehicles and pedestrian alike use to their advantage.

Everyone usual arrives uninjured and quite alive despite this circumstance. Not long into the standing immersed in the heavy buoyant moisture that feels oddly pleasant the bus arrives to collect us at these sleepy crossroads under a sodium streetlight that will pop out then back on mysteriously from time to time.
My next door neighbor, G, newbie, and I all embark slowly, marching to each our own cadence ever toward that daily endgame.

The ride transforms into time-altering sequence, where great spans of time ostensibly accelerate then ebb to the normal rate without warning and perceptible appearance. One moment a large lady strains her quadriceps to the very limit coming up the front stairs near the start of the route then those familiar forces at the end are barely distinguished through mist streaked glass bundled neatly at the onset of venturing into the wide-open space, akin to a coma the in-between almost becomes undefined, a singularity within space. In fact, perhaps these moments should be considered such phenomena and the classical point of view finally dismissed. -For each individual is nothing other than a collection of atoms that participate in that paradox between giving structure, position, and translation, but by themselves only one of those three at a time can be delineated to any meaningful resolution our peon human brains can understand.

-But no, in most cases out preconceptions sculpted from our insignificant fears take precedent when perceiving the world around us, glancing if at all over the one that survives amid.

3-December-2009 6:23AM

The moon casts a wayward eye through a dewy dim haze reflecting the hidden Sun’s light in a soft glow upon frosted outward-facing surfaces. The air itself acts as a media for this said refraction that assembles its infinitesimal parts ever so tighter thus rendering it to feel as though a thief to the human body or perhaps a damned spirit that requires the warmth of the living that pass.

Once I transcend the distance through this gelid space I turn to fact the East, as I do every morning to wait for the bus and tilt my eye skyward to look through the tallish firs, power lines, and the rising foothill that would seek to obstruct this vista of the heavens. The only stars I can see are Arcturus, the orange giant of twenty sun’s diameters about eleven parsecs distant and then the smattering pinpricks of the two bears’ constellations smarting down from directly overhead.

Plumes of moisture blast intermittently from myself and the two others that stand in wait here to be carted off to regions not too far in a geographic sense. -But then are galaxies away from the heart and substance of any and all matters that clamor for attention in this particular point in space-time.

***

The ride is uneventful, uninspiring, and verily indelectable. Like I mentioned, we are “carted off” to those other regions, each of us, to places that concurrently push the anima into submission but to live as we do, or for others as they do.

The ambiance is exaggerated in phosphorescence inside, hewing a panorama of darkened coats hung on shoulders of those of stony or grim countenances. As always, they read, they listen, they stare off into the distance, they sleep, they sit, they let go of all resistance.

…And then tomorrow is today’s “replicant,” but for those volatiles that would change it all in an instant.

2-December-2009 7:02AM

Fleeting impressions cascade through the din of defroster fans blasting on board the bus this morning of those set against the imminent arrival of winter. I sometimes think back at times like this on Ursula Le Guin’s story Planet of Exile where the period of revolution of that said world fell into a timeframe of about sixty years, and then attempt to postulate how in fact would we be different here for that one simple change in astronomical constant.

Would these “fleeting impressions” become more pronounced?

As a world culture would we be a bit more rigid in our approach to survival, which I think in essence everything else follows after?

Nevertheless, the categories of riders remain as diverse and ridiculous as ever, one would think that a temperature of one to two Centigrade would demand a certain level of respect, but then not so much as to require an Arctic region’s parka. –But no of course, there exists the gambit of extremes ranging from exercise shorts and a track suit jacket to that of a full-on puffed-out down coat that could withstand the harshest conditions that the cold miser could bring, replete with thickened fur linings along the hems of their perpetually raised cowls; yes, even on the heated bus.