Adventures In Bus Riding

Hello Good People, I miss you.

As a walk to work would probably be a 2-3 hour endeavor, I’m back to taking the bus. I haven’t been in a public transit place since the San Francisco salad days. And I was good man, I had my routes down. I knew how to get to some places. I had hopped on the 23 Monterey a number of times, I had made friends with the 43 Masonic.

More than once, Mercedes and I have tried to drunkenly recount all the SF Muni bus lines in numerical order. Sure it sounds boring, and is for anyone else listening while we try, but it beats the crap out of drunkenly singing “American Pie.” I’m not sure who is drunkenly singing “American Pie,” but they should stop.

My first day of riding the coaches was frustrating, mostly because of the familiarity of previous bus routes. The King County Metro website trip planner advised a convoluted path to work that included a wet transfer it some sparsely populated, unincorporated part of the county – where I wouldn’t been surprised to witness the slaying of a number of pretty, but poorly acted, teenagers at the hands of an inbred and deformed killer in a mask. It took an hour to get someplace that is maybe six miles away.

“I call bullshit,” I said to the King County Metro website trip planner. No response to that, but I did find a route that didn’t take me through the boonies. After the end of a Mariner’s game, said route began to flaunt its scheduled arrival time like a president denying responsibility – aggressively. 45 minutes after I was to leave work, I was finally standing towards the back of one of those extra long busses with the accordion section in the middle.

I like busses with an accordion section in the middle, partly because I like accordions. I also like circular stairways and revolving doors, I’m not sure why those things were linked together in my mind, but they were. Anyway, I like buses with an accordion section in the middle because these busses seem to defy physics sometimes. The bus may be making a turn and suddenly the back half is at a right angle to the front half. It’s like a horrible accident without the carnage, it’s like a pretty boring amusement park ride.

So I was on this bus, angry and frustrated that I was now going to be way late in getting home. I was standing there, with what I must assume was a scowl on my face, when the ol’ Deuce Deuce made one of those mind bending right turns. This girl that had been sitting on a seat that faced the walls of the bus, this girl that had a punkish hairdo and accoutrements but wore some nice slacks and a sweater, she was suddenly spun around so she was facing me directly.

Our eyes met for a split second and she smiled sort of slyly before my half of the bus caught the drift of the situation and swung around the corner as well. Sometimes those small little moments of connection can make up for some bad trip planner advice and a couple thousand drunken baseball fans – some of whom may have been singing “American Pie”.


Song Stuck In My Head Right Now: “I’ve Seen All Good People” by Yes. But I have this live version stuck there that I heard once when I was flooded by classic rock in college where between the sung line of “I’ve seen all good people turn their heads each day so satisfied I’m on my way”, the lead singer would wail out a band members name – I always hear the falsetto cry of “Christopher Squier!” in my mind.