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Bus People Pt. 2
I was rolling my bag along through the airport terminal and saw the guy with the thinning hair again. Same big neon green sneakers. Same look of reckless resentment towards the world. I wondered if he recognized me. I wondered where he was going. The only thing that had changed about him was that now he had corn rows. I wonder what his mom had thought of that.
-P
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Bus People
I get on as the bus starts moving and the change in motion disorients me; I move one way, the world as I know it moves the other. I sink into a seat.
He’s got medium-length, thinning hair, gelled into little straight antennae all over his head. Tattoos cover his hands and he wears a White Sox jersey, black jeans, and bright green shoes. He recognizes a man across from me, and they start talking, about his well-being, about his mother.
He has a friend too, who is on the phone, inquiring about twenty dollars that disappeared from his credit card, leaving him broke. He rattles off numbers, credit card numbers, his inmate number (he’d just been released from some correctional center). All the while he picks at a hole in his jeans with grotesque fingernails.
My stop comes and I get off the bus. A silver sports car with windows open crawls past in the traffic, blasting a pop song. The driver looks clean, spoiled, wearing sunglasses on a foggy day. I laugh at him as I walk by, at his ignorance, at what I saw, at the fact that I understand his city better than he does. But as I make my way to my dorm, clutching my shaving cream, body wash, and nutritional drinks, thinking about a girl, I realize I’m being hard on the guy… I don’t know this city anymore than anyone. I don’t understand anything.
-P
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Visitors
I know there are rats here. If I saw one, someone told me, I’d see them everywhere. I saw one last week.
Now, when I walk around campus, surrounded by buildings grand and dignified and full of knowledge and prestige, I hear rustling in the trash cans next to me.
On my way to get dinner last night I saw a big grey shadow scurrying towards the bushes by the cafeteria.
I heard somebody scratching a little hole in my wall last night. Eventually they’ll scratch their way into my soul.
-P
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Our hometown
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What you hear/what it means #1
What you hear: “Dude, I smoke weed every day. I’ve been high 24/7 for the last three months.”
What it means: “Dude, if I wasn’t high all the time, I’d be forced to actually look at my life and see that I’m too fat/ugly/socially maladjusted to be happy and probably end up killing myself.”
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Film
I fucking hate people who unnecessarily use the word “film”. There are many words that can be used to describe a motion picture, such as movie, flick or feature, but for some horrible reason all the snide and arrogant self proclaimed “film buffs” that I have ever met decide to beat the word film into the fucking ground. When was the last time some pseudo-intellectual, pompous, snide hipster looked at you through his/her thick rimmed glasses and said, “I love Fellini’s movies?” Probably NEVER because they have been too busy saying things like “Fellini has sensibilities and sensitivities that only a European FILMmaker would have in his FILMS.” If I read another Facebook post in which someone says “dude this FILM is so trippy” or “they don’t make FILMS like this anymore” I’m going to buy a gun and blast someone.
NEWS FLASH ASSHOLES, MOST “FILMS” AREN’T EVEN SHOT ON FILM ANYMORE THEY ARE SHOT ON DIGITAL HARDDRIVES OR TAPES.
I’m sorry for all the rage, I just had a movie club meeting where I just heard 20 people use the word film 10 x 10^128 times so my brain is on fire.
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Eyes
He came back to his dorm at 2 AM, took off his clothes, put on flip-flops and then walked towards the common bathroom. Upon entering, he gazed in disgust at the tiled floor. Every ball of pubic hairs, band aid wrapper and used tissue that he noticed, made him cringe. He shifted his attention to the mirror and saw that his eyes were now a bulging red. The once forest-green color that had earned him compliments from women and envy from his family was now gone. The man wondered what could have caused this sudden change. Perhaps it was from staring at a computer screen in the library for five hours straight, going from obsessively checking his satirical blog to obsessively editing his essay. Or perhaps it was the last two hours spent in his friend’s room, smoking from a bong and letting whirlwinds of smoke brush across his face. He felt his eyes pulsing, coinciding with every slowing heart beat. As the man walked towards the bathroom cabinet to get his toiletry bag, he suddenly fainted and fell right in the middle of a murky puddle. Moments later, a few drunk students dressed as hobbits found him lying on the floor and dumped a cup of water on his head. The man awoke instantly and was frightened to see that he was now encircled by hobbits. They lifted him up, walked him back to his room and sang him an ancient lullaby from the Shire. All was now good.
-S
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Sleeping & Waking on a Plane →
This is what I want to be.
I had fallen asleep, but somehow had not slept. I played with my eyelids, felt their lashes touch, measured the fading of what little light remained as they came close to closing; several times, I closed them totally, as if by accident, and seemed to drift away again. When I woke again, it seemed…
