3/4 – Doctor’s Office – Waiting Room

My fiancee and I have had the flu off and on for a month at this point. It’s swimming laps between us, getting stronger. It’s a Saturday, but the doctor agrees to meet us at the office. As he gets out of his car in the parking lot, I know he’s the doctor right away because he’s wearing a North Face fleece pullover sweater which is part of the successful person uniform. He could have pulled up in an ambulance and emerged wearing a stethoscope and a mortarboard. Also, there’s nobody else in the parking lot so it had to be him. I just wanted to say ‘stethoscope and mortarboard.’ But keep an eye out for that fleece pullover, it’s always getting into an Audi.

Right after the doctor arrives, a cab pulls up and an old woman is helped out of the car and into a wheelchair. Amanda is just looking for a quick anti-biotic prescription and seems suddenly aware that she is standing upright and holding a takeout coffee cup. It feels a little awkward when the doctor says  ”She was here first,” and takes Amanda back to the examination room before the wheelchair lady, who is clearly in a bit of discomfort.

She is in her seventies, a heavyset grandmother with mostly white hair,  she’s very sweet and she smiles like she means it. She has an accent that I can’t place. It feels old, like it’s been here a long time.   The woman I presume to be her daughter sits on the far side of the room, putting the grandmother directly in the center of us, and seems to be in surprisingly good spirits considering everything. The three of us talk.

The grandmother hikes up her pant leg to show me how swollen her legs are, holds her hands out to me to show me how swollen they are, and they hurt, they keep her up at night all the time. The daughter interjects with information regarding the grandmother’s ailments, and repeats what the grandmother says to confirm with me that it’s all true. I nod and I try to be cordial, I try to stay present and not think about how much I hate waiting rooms. I make a grimace and shake my head left and right and try to relate that I can’t imagine what that’s like, but I want them to know that I feel for them. I wind up describing what brought us here, that it’s nothing major, she’s just been fighting something off for a while and wants to get antibiotics.

“Maybe she’s pregnant, eh?” the grandmother says and she chuckles. And I have a flash of panic, “No, no, I don’t think so. Just the flu, I think” She chuckles and raises her eyebrows at me “eh?”

The daughter gets on the phone and calls someone. The grandmother asks “Is that?” and it is, the daughter and the person on the phone talk back and forth, the daughter details the morning and jokes into the phone “I told her I was going to just let her go at the top of the hill and let her roll here!” The grandmother turns to me and says “That would be fine, if there is no pain.” she says “I’m so tired all the time.” She holds her hands out in front of her. “So many pills.” It’s quiet, the grandmother looks at her hands, I am stunned,  the daughter is holding the phone to her head and we both look at the grandmother and it’s the whole world in the pit of my stomach and I look back and forth, thinking about how this is something to write about, and then feeling terrible for thinking that and go back to silently screaming at the daughter for saying that to her mother at least twice.

The grandmother and I continue talking about her ailments, about Amanda. She asks if she’s my wife – “My fiancee,” I say. And she beams at me, “That’s nice.” The daughter is suddenly off the phone and says that her young nephew just got engaged. He’s trying to be an NFL player. Her whole family is trying to be an NFL player. She paints a proud picture of a series of young healthy men, fighting to make the NFL, leaning to the right so she can speak to me around the grandmother. She asks if I know who Marshawn Lynch is, only to stop herself in the middle to explain to herself that of course I know who Marshawn Lynch is – but I don’t, despite the context clues, and despite my having heard that name before. “No,” “HAHAHA” I don’t” I say. The grandmother laughs at my saying no, and looks back at her daughter to laugh at the presumption. The grandmother laughs over her daughter explaining their relationship to Marshawn Lynch. I think she’s his aunt, that the grandmother is his grandmother, but I don’t catch it well enough because I’m trying not to laugh at the grandmother laughing at her daughter.

“He’s an NFL player.” “Oh ok, I thought so. I’m more of a baseball guy.” The grandmother is making a grimace and shaking her head. The daughter goes on about football. About all the men in her family going out for football. That it’s fine when you’re young, so long as you have something to fall back on if you get hurt and can’t play anymore. The grandmother interjects “Unless they hurt their brains. All those concussions.” She frowns and looks at me and the daughter gets quiet. And we sit silently for a moment, in the waiting room of a doctor’s office, and the grandmother stretches her swollen hands out in front of her, tuts and shakes her head at the thought of it.

Before I realize she’s in the room, the grandmother says “You are pregnant!” and beams at us. We leave, Amanda is not pregnant, but I tell Amanda that if we ever have a son, he’s not allowed to play football and if we ever have a daughter her beautiful name will be “Marshawn Lynch’s Grandmother Sanders.”

2/6 – At Work – Elevator

There was a kid- myth when I was a kid that went like this: When riding in an elevator,  if you jump just as you reach your floor, if you time it just right and jump, you’ll jump incredibly high. You’ll hit the ceiling, but for just a second you’ll be flying, weightless as an astronaut. But, that’s only if you’re going up. Like all the best kid-myths, this has a terrible dark side. If you accidentally jump when you’re going DOWN on the elevator, you’ll compress into goo. Your bones will shatter and the terrible strain of the elevator returning to earth will magnify around your shoulders and  your family will need to mop up your remains. Your DEAD remains.

I’m walking into my office building and a person I work with is ahead of me about fifteen paces when a small miracle happens and I realize that my shoe is untied. If I do it right, I’ll be able to tie my shoe during the time it takes for an elevator to arrive and whisk my coworker out of the range of my awkward conversation. I take my time to bend down, carefully weigh my options: I could go double knot – it’s early in the day, the extra security could be worth it, I daren’t go triple knot, lest I be buried in this shoe, but a double knot, while dangerous in its own right, just might work. I do my best to not have this conversation out loud.

The stalling doesn’t work, the co-worker is still waiting on the elevator and I try to walk as slowly as possible without it being obvious that I’m walking very slowly. I try to make very normal movements with my arms and legs, but take tiny baby steps. I’m confident that I look perfectly normal, if not downright elegant, to the outside viewers who are walking by me at breakneck speeds.

It’s just me and the co-worker in the elevator, she’s already pressed 3 but I feign for the button anyway, as it allows me to  turn and look away. I’m working on this socially awkward nonsense, by the way, I thought it’d help me to talk about it more openly, but it’s just made it worse. And here’s why it’s a problem, because I don’t know how to handle myself when things like this happen:

The coworker begins by rolling her eyes and sighing “MONDAY MONDAY” (slightly to the tune of ‘Monday, Monday‘ by the Mamas and the Papas), because today is Monday. “How was the weekend? Good? Good. So how’s everything going for you – I hear you have some sort of magazine… or you do a book…. how’s —  uhm — any new… projects?”

During my underwater saunter to the elevator, I’d stocked up on emphatic and enthusiastic SuperBowl chit-chat. “It WAS a GOOD game!” “She IS old, but you’re right, she looked TERRIFIC.” “I WEPT at the sight of the FIGHTER JETS.” All of it for nothing, because this person had a stockpile of information about me that I’d not provided and this person had decided to reveal that they had this information, in the same way your grandmother would ask you about video games, or some other thing she thought was quaint and adorably silly. Or, perhaps, the way a normal person asks a freakshow about their weird freakshow interests. “How’s bushing dolls hair in the dark? Fun? Any new…dolls? Is there much… crying?  Sure is a small elevatorIhaveaguninmypurse.”

But her real questions hung there, waiting through the uncomfortable pause, enough time for us to reach our floor, so I  jumped. Floated for a moment before slamming into the ceiling, feeling the gravity of it on my chest, pressing on my heart, cracking the plastic light fixture behind me, speaking through difficult breaths “Uhm.Yeah. Yeah. Writer. How could you know that? Do I do a book? What? Sure, I do a book.” She’s polite about it, looks up at me and nods, pretending to understand and seeming concerned. “Kind of weird about it, still, you know, still, if you can believe it.” It takes a while for the doors to open, to drop back to the floor, catch my breath, clear the spots from my vision and say too loudly “Have a good day” over her follow up questions, but proud that my tense response to her questions wasn’t “DID YOU SEE THE FOOTBALL GAME, THERE WAS SO MANY COMMERCIALS I WANT TO RECREATE RIGHT NOW WITH MY VOICE!”

1/24 – At Work – Conference Room

The only thing more hypnotic than watching people arbitrarily nod with the corners of their mouths curled into ‘good point’ agreement during a teleconference is the the moment just before they begin nodding. It’s slightly more hypnotic to watch them frown slightly to convey that they are carefully considering the point before they pretend to understand the point, then kick their head back in a beautiful ‘a ha’ to begin nodding at a plastic box on a table twenty feet away, that’s connected to a person speaking two thousand miles away that cannot see them go through this process. About ten people just did this without understanding that I’m the only person who is noticing them go through this whole display, and I’m only staring at them in the hopes that it will make me stop hearing the person next to me breathe while they eat a bagel with too much cream cheese, which was the only thing that was letting me ignore completely my watch, which has been accurately displaying each second of my life that has gone by.

1/5/12 – Homeward – BART

There are two ways to get through the turnstiles and into the train station. I’ve resisted calling it a BART station because that will narrow down where I live, and I feel like that’s a secret I should reveal only to Oprah when she comes out of retirement to interview me about this blog.  It’s the Oakland MacArthur BART station.

Frequent travelers can buy a little blue card that will allow them to more quickly pass through the turnstiles which makes your life more convenient, but allows for the government and/or Oprah to track all of my movements, so I stick with buying the single use tickets, one at a time, wasting ever more of my life standing in front of a  difficult-to-navigate ticket computer that was built-in the early seventies by idiots.

When I first moved to San Francisco, I had to stop a stranger and ask them how to use the computer because it’s a little baffling. Above the computer there’s a chart of fares, you have to consult a paper chart pasted above your head in a place that, regardless of how tall you are, requires you to lean back at an awkward angle, find your station, run your finger across to the ticket price, a ha!, $3.20, no wait, round trip, $6.40,  before you return to the computer and try to input, via subtraction from an automatically generated $20, how much money you need on your ticket – instead of just listing the destinations and fares in the computer itself.  So it’s understandable when a young girl next to me, asks me in a nearly inaudible voice ‘how many of these do I need to get to Hayward?”

“How many of what? It only gives you one ticket.” And I say that reflexively, like I didn’t also hate the machine, but instead built it by hand in the 70s. Interestingly, my building a computer would result in a similarly shitty computer because I have no business building computers.

She says “I’m sorry. I’m kind of all over the place right now.”  I assume that ‘right now’ doesn’t mean ‘here at the BART station’, because nobody ever means right now when they say ‘right now’, but generally ‘My life is kind of a mess lately, and it’s gotten to the point where I need to go to Hayward, with suitcases, in a hurry.’

I ask for just a second to finish my own ticket purchase, and when I turn around she’s squatted to the ground and is holding her head in her hands. And now I’m nervous, because I’m worried that she’s reacting to me on top of whatever’s in Hayward. When she comes back, we share an awkward glance before I start to walk her through the process of buying a train ticket in 1975 and her hands are shaking, and she’s not really following along too well, and I venture a “Aaare you alright? You ok?” “I just… Hayward. Let’s – yeah. Yeah I’m. Yeah. ” I start to feel like she’s picking up that I’m nervous about her being nervous and now we’re standing close to each other, but slowly pitching back to an angle that would allow us to read a chart over our heads that indicated how frightened we are of one another. She might be frightened of whatever’s in Hayward, but I’m frightened of her, because I’m afraid she might be frightened of me, so I apologize to her, and it confuses her, and we pitch backwards further until I leave in a hurry. This is how I move through the world, horribly frightened of bothering people, convinced that Oprah is tracking me, and apologizing.

Once I leave, I have to get in the very back of a longer-than-usual line at the turnstile. A large woman with fresh from the hair dresser hair just slammed her golden purse and golden shoes on top of the turnstile and announces “Ya’ll better go around, this is going to be a while. I don’t give a shit right now.” The rest of the line goes to the other side of the station, and I wait, staring at this woman trying to find her ticket, bright golden shoes on the turnstile, wearing plastic bags on her feet.

Ambiance: “No, seriously, you can go around, I do not give a fuck.”

 

 

 

11/2 – Oakland International Airport – To Philadelphia

I wind up having to get a bacon egg and cheese croissant from some place with a  fake wood oven and a faker French name. There’s fire inside the fake wood oven and I imagine it helps the cooking process, but it seems to be entirely decorative and in no way connected to what appears to be a giant, silver hot plate.

Ahead of me in line is a woman with ‘perfect eyebrows’. The cashier compliments her and goes on and on about her eyebrows, and then she realizes that she’s said too much, tries to cover her tracks “I know it’s weird, I just notice everyone’s eyebrows. I mean, it’s just that mine – whatever I know it’s weird.” It’s really sweet, she’s not being creepy about it, she’s really trying to compliment the woman and I’m not sure what it is that makes her become uncomfortable until she looks over the eyebrow’s shoulder at me, and scowls at my smiling at her sweet cover up attempt. Then I feel bad and get a croissant sandwich and we don’t make eye contact during one of the top five terse breakfast sandwich orderings of my life. Maybe top three.

I sit at one of the tables to the left of the counter, each of which, insanely, has an umbrella. I imagine it’s to suggest that you’re at some fancy outside eatery in France, and not in the Oakland I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-International Airport. Tinny awful accordion music plays and suddenly I lock eyes with another man and am placed under his thrall. The umbrella shade is arranged in such a way that only his eyes are in the light – like a detective in an old noir movie or Alec Baldwin in The Phantom (1996). He’s a pudgy business man, about 45, is packing a croissant into his head like he’s promised someone he would  eat a croissant every day for the rest of his life and was just going through the motions. I cannot take my eyes off of him because that dumb beam of light just across his eyes, and begin picturing him going through all his daily routines with a beam of light across his eyes.

He’s bald, has a bad goatee, red splotchy heart disease face and I’m as straight as the lord commands but it’s just too perfect and I can’t look away. I settle on deciding that he’s an old noir detective, fallen out of favor, resigned to small crimes and, having used up all the good one liners on the dames and the mooks, now forcefully jams  croissant sandwich references into every awkward moment. But he was a detective, and he used to be in black and white, but now he’s fat and wheezing and sweating through his croissant sandwiches but there’s just enough hope left that the shadows still fall the way he wants to when he wants to look intimidating. And he does, because there’s a strange bald man staring at him, and he won’t look away, even though they’ve locked eyes and it’s become increasingly uncomfortable. The strange bald man goes right on eating his own croissant sandwich, dropping bits of egg on himself and wishing he wasn’t at an airport, wondering if it’s too late in his life to get a detective’s license and learn how to be someone who never gets caught looking at anybody.

9/19 – To Work – Train

We come to a screeching halt and it’s violent enough for me to think I’m going to fall, but I catch myself and we all straighten ourselves up together. People pick up their cell phones and one guy flutters his newspaper back into shape and the people picking up their cell phones look at him like he’s stepped out of a silent film about old timey idiots.

In the very next moment, people start sighing. Everyone is agitated. Nobody is hurt, but everyone is agitated. One jerk announces to his friends ‘I’ll look and see if anythings on the website.” The newspaper man looks over at him, as we all do, but I feel a kinship with newspaper man, who understands that we only just stopped moving. Not even ten seconds ago. There is simply no physical way enough words could have been typed to tell anyone about the thing that happened twelve seconds ago. But he looks anyway, and it’s nice because it occupies him for another five minutes or so, until he says ‘No, nothing on the website” and he’s surprised about it and I want the tunnel to flood. I want to be standing knee deep in water and I want to watch him check his cell phone to see if “Maybe there’s something online about the flooding, maybe something about breathing underwater or maybe burblegurgleburble.” But no such luck.

His friends are two girls about his age and I assume they hate him because he is unlikable and stupid. They ruin this notion shortly by matching his stupid unlikability point for point. But first: “Sorry for the inconvience ladies and gentlemen, there’s been an issue up ahead. Someone has jumped onto the tracks” the conductor takes a sighing breath over the loudspeaker before continuing “and security is going to have to collect this person before we’re allowed to continue.” He’s exasperated. Just like every single person on the train. Every single person sighs and mutters and is upset. “Please keep calm, I’ve just been told we’re going to lose power so” another sigh “this PERSON doesn’t hit the third rail and get a thousand volts.” Sigh. Click. Mutter. Mutter. Internet Jones makes a bad joke about how he should have a flask for these situations, I’m guessing he means when he wants to celebrate? I forget to ask him, I become dazzled by his frosted hair.

One of the girls who is sitting with Internet Jones decides it’d be a good time to say this: “Silence like this freaks me out.” It’s unfortunate, because the silence was lovely. We’d lost a lot of lights a moment beforehand. And the air conditioning. So it was warm and quiet, and we’re all sitting together having a small, quiet experience together, underground of all places. Just above us is all the noise you could ever want and every bit of it is going to run you over soon enough, but for now, just a moment of quiet with other humans. It was a nice moment, but she can’t handle it and starts talking again. “I guess, what, he killed himself or something?”

After about twenty minutes the lights come back on and a few people say ‘Thank God!’ one person says “Gotta love public transportation, huh?’ The engineer comes on and announces that we’d be moving in just a second, it turns out that nobody jumped onto the tracks, a person in a wheelchair had accidentally fallen onto the tracks.

And then it got nice and quiet again.

8/18 – To Work – Second Bus

I look up from my book because someone walked on the bus beat boxing poorly. He’s just doing the high hat “TISH Tis Tish Tis TISH TISH Tis.” He is a white guy with a ridiculous dirty blond afro that is collapsing under its own weight onto his chrome aviator shades. He’s wearing Adidas jogging pants and a Nike tshirt that says ‘MASSAGE TEAM’ in big letters across the front. TISH TSSH TIS! Bopping his head to the music that is playing scratchy, tinny, loudly through his cell phone’s speaker. Maybe headphones were invented in the 80s and he doesnt want to seem anachronistic. Like when you spot a digital watch in a western movie.

He is his own theme party and he’s thrilled about it. He’s smiling when he sits down and turns off the speaker, which is nice because I was going to tell him to turn it off if he didn’t and I never do that sort of thing, but he’s not a real person, so I think I would have managed it.

Most of the ride, Disco Stu is pretty quiet. He leans all the way back, so that his head is resting on the back of the seat, and slowly rocks his head back and forth in a ‘I’m too damn relaxed’ sway.  All of the seats are taken and there’s one guy standing in the back, next to the handicapped entrance, right in front of Disco Stu. I’m guessing Stu realizes that the the guy is black first, and then that he’s blocking the handicapped entrance and and says in stunted, I-don’t-normally-talk-like-this-rhythm  “Yo man, you just made me realize, like, what if a handicapped person had to get on, you know what I’m sayin?” The black guy, confused says “Oh what’s going on?” “I’m just sayin, like, if a handicapped person had to get on, it’d be, like, tough as shit to get on with that thing right? I mean, for real.” Then Stu nervously chuckles where I think he thought he was going to get a black panther fist salute of solidarity. But the guy just looked at the handicapped entrance, back at Stu, and said “What’s going on?” and Stu said, sadly “Nah, nothin man. Forget it.” The black guy, in his business suit, rang the bell and walked off the bus and Stu got tense and sat like a grown up in his seat.

I can only imagine that “The Tale of the Time Stu got his Mellow Harshed”, will echo through generations of his Funky Disco Family.

 

 

 

 

8/16 – To Work – First Bus

The woman seated across from me slowly lowers her book to her lap, and slowly tilts her head back and inhales sharply. She’s sitting directly across from me and she’s going to sneeze. I wince, because I realize she’s not going to cover her sneeze with her book, but instead sneeze across the aisle and into my wincing face. Her eyes are screwed tight, but her mouth is half open, and she’s taking short, quick inhales. Every time she inhales, I slide back into my seat, pull my head back and towards my left shoulder. And she keeps doing it. And I start to wonder why our heads are the way they are, what a weird, limited appendage. My hands are safe, tucked behind my book, or behind my back, or waving around and out of harms way, and here’s my big dumb head unable to move more than five or six inches and it’s got all of my senses in it waiting to be sneezed on.

I had a girlfriend once who closed a cabinet door on her own head. I still think about that sometimes. Maybe every day.  Everything she knew about the world was in that cabinet, and something in that same head told her hands to shut the door.  She didn’t bump the door closed, her brain sent a signal down her arm and her muscles flexed and her elbow bent and at the last minute she didn’t try to not shut the door. She just shut the door right on her own head and then was surprised enough about it to mention it to me later.  It didn’t work out between us. She’s a physical therapist now. That’s an aside. Back to Sneezer.

The bus ride is a good eight minutes. Around minute four of the almost sneeze, I stop pretending that I’m not looking at her and just stare at her. Her face is contorted in every way imaginable and her whole body must be a lung. She’s done the ‘Ah-Ah’ inhale part of the sneeze for four minutes now and I have to believe her shoes are about to rupture from the sudden inflation of her feet. Her head is pressed back into the window and I’m waiting for it to spiderweb from the pressure, but it doesn’t. And she never sneezes.

When I get off the bus, I sneeze three times, like I’ve done every time I’ve been outside since I moved to California. I finally understand why. That Sneezer lady isn’t just some dumb lady, she’s is a shitty Witch. I probably ran over her kid or something. Fair enough, I’ve been cursed. It happens. Here I thought it was the pollen. What a dope. I must have ran over her kid with my car. Live and learn.

6/2 – To Work – First Bus

I sit down in the bus shelter next to a young homeless guy having a pleasant conversation with a pretty young lady. He makes her laugh a few times and if things were a little different, he’d probably get her phone number. He’d be a good looking guy if he cleaned up. He’s in good shape. I hope they wind up together, married on a mountain top, a shining triumph of love over adversity, but more than that, I hope they talk until my bus comes so I don’t have to talk to him.

The pretty lady walks away, and his head whips sharply at me and says “HEY MAN WHAT ARE YOU READING?!” like I’d promised I’d help him with something but I’d stopped and started reading instead. How could I be reading at a time like this, when there’s so much talking to him to do? I half closed the book and tilted it in his direction so he could read the cover. He declines to look at the book and instead opens his eyes as wide as he can and stare at me.

“It’s ‘The Book of Illusions.’”

“OH YEAH? DO YOU BELIEVE JESUS CHRIST DIED FOR YOUR SINS AND THAT BOOK?!”

“You are making me uncomfortable!” I don’t say because I’ve always been afraid that if I ever muster the nerve to say that phrase to another human being a bell will ring inside of me, and then I will never say anything else ever again. You are making me uncomfortable. I’d like to talk about the news, but you are making me uncomfortable. I want to tell you about my life, but you are making me uncomfortable.   Of course I know that I’m making you uncomfortable, but you are making me uncomfortable.

I settle on feeling exhausted and saying nothing and he prattles on about the bible. When the bus comes I pry the doors open with my bare hands to get in faster. We pull away, leaving my Bible Study Buddy behind. The bus pulls to the next stop and lets one passenger out the back door and suitcase hoarder through the front door, she slowly stacks suitcases on the front seats. The back door is open. I discover that I hate suitcases and read my book until someone pats my knee.

“HEY BUDDY, IT’S ME! DON’T SAY NOTHIN!” My Bible Study Buddy has ran two blocks, snuck through the back door and is crouched, using me and a frightened old lady to hide behind. And while I’m happy to see him, he is making me uncomfortable.  “REMEMBER? I SAID I GOTTA GET DOWNTOWN!” The driver sees him and yells until he gets off. He has enough time to shout through the closing doors “FUCK THIS BUS. THIS BUS IS BULLSHIT.” Amen.

Ambiance: The sound of an old leather purse crinkling under the white knuckles of a terrified old lady.

8/2 – To Work – First Bus

It’s early and I have a panic dream hangover. Everything is foggy and the driver keeps saying ten cents and I don’t know how long I’ve been standing there. She’s patting the top of the pay box and saying ten cents. I just put two dollars in. I paid. I woke up at 4am in a start and I don’t know why. The metal on her rings is clicking the metal of the pay box. The bus hasn’t moved yet.  I slept for three hours. Maybe two. Ten cents.

The driver has long red nails with white swirls. They don’t look fake and I think about how long that would take. It must be frustrating to have to be so careful. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.” And now a third person is shouting ten cents and pointing. The bus is not moving and it’s my fault and I’m too tired to realize what’s going on. “I put two dollars in. I did it already Idididalredy.” Everyone is shouting “Ten cents!” and only “Ten cents!”

A guy on the other side of the ten cent choir is playing a handheld game and starts to swing his feet and shout “BOUNCY BOUNCY BOUNCY” in time with the game. Everyone pauses to look at him, then back at me to shout about ten cents. He’s mentally disabled, and I’m dizzy and start to think about how to describe him later, when I write this. I don’t want to make fun. I should just get one of those cards instead of paying cash for the bus each time. Mentally retarded? Instead of solving the ten cent mystery, I’m thinking about everything that isn’t happening right now. It’s making me aware of my fatigue and I feel like I should explain to everyone that I haven’t slept, that’s why I’m confused, that I woke up gasping from a nightmare and decided not to go back to sleep because I’m a grownup and I’m allowed to be a coward. Mentally challenged? Ten cents! Her rings are clicking on the pay box and a woman behind me has a dime in her hand and putting it in mine and I don’t think it would even be strange if I suddenly realized my hands were wrinkled and I was eighty years old. I’m baffled and tired and angry at people for trying to help me. I think that will be how I spend my 80′s. It’s how I spend most of my time now. Mentally handicapped?

I sit down and one of the ladies catches my eye and points. There are signs all over the bus, and presumably, all over every bus I’ve taken for months, announcing the 10 cent fare hike. Mentally disabled is probably the right term. Mentally disabled.