Different Ways

I shouldn’t have sat in the back of the bus. Not the bus that rolls through the congested heart of Tacoma. The rebel in me made me do it, my fondness for all those years of public school buses chauffeuring shady acquaintances with rubberband slingshots and spit balls and dirty jokes made me do it, made me huck my bag in the furthest back corner of an empty bus and slouch-sprawl across the two and a half seats by the window. There was a reason that my shady friends in school sheltered in the ass-most seats of all those yellow buses: the seats of a bus act like a filter for civil expectations and etiquette, with the foremost seats skimming all of those upstanding members of society that really feel at home around authority, the middle seats catching those who simply want to keep their heads down, so by the time you pass the second wheel well all signs of calm and decency have been extracted and your left with the passenger equivalent of garbage juice that leaks from the corners of torn bags. I leaned against the rearmost window and counted the liquor stores.

A tall gentleman in his twenties boarded at the Tacoma Dome alongside a raucous group of highschoolers. The tall man and one of the highschoolers were each playing different rap songs that were both about getting high out of the speakers on their phones, they sat next to each other. Beside me. In the way back. The man pulled out what I suppose could be construed as a stylish leather fanny pack (although one must assume that this person would not have used the term fanny pack). From it he produced a Swisher and a quaint bag of ground riefer. Bathed in the noxious sweet and pungent aroma of the Swisher and the weed, and bobbing his head to one of the dueling songs, he deftly split, extracted, replaced, rolled and licked a blunt into creation. I smirk at the temptation to ask him if he is also starting a Pilgrimage on this bus.