I'm greedy.

I don't want to lose this.

At this time I'm happiest when I'm writing and I spend evenings and late nights when I can't sleep on boxes. A couple I've originally intended as presents for other people, but by the time I'm finished they contain a piece of my life story and I've become so attached that I can't bear the thought of parting with them.

Things could start changing after my appointments tomorrow.

I have other things I want to do, too. I mostly want to start running again. I think about it nearly every day. I also want to be able to focus and concentrate and sleep and have normal conversations. I'm ready to stop fighting the urge to step on the gas when a Muni train is crossing.

Thank God for J. She is bipolar as well, and is the only person I've ever talked to that really, really understands. She gives me hope, and she gives me courage.

One last MUNI story (or "Take my dignity. Please.")

There won't be too many of these anymore, so I felt like I should get this one down for posterity.

I was on an overcrowded 38 Geary recently. It was about 2am, and the bus was jammed with twentysomethings making the drunken cross-town ride home after the bars closed. Admittedly I've been there once or twice, but tonight I wasn't drunk. I was just going home late and, for reasons not worth going into, I had a thin little black mustache penciled onto my face.

It made me look decidedly creepy.

Because it was so full, I didn't have a seat. Instead, I stood in the aisle holding onto a rope handle that dangled from the ceiling. I swayed and jerked with the bus's movements and tried in vain to keep the straps of my bag on my shoulder.

As we paused at a stoplight, I needed to give my arms a brief break from being up in the air over my head. I hadn't even let go of that rope strap for five seconds when the bus suddenly lurched forward and I was caught off-guard and went to the floor. On my knees. In between the legs of a surprised young Latino man sitting nearby.

I'm sure I flushed bright red. "Excuse me," I mumbled from under my little mustache. He didn't say anything. My eyes met with those of an elderly Asian man staring at me unsympathetically from a nearby seat. Because all the seats were full, there was nothing to grab onto as I was getting up. My shoulder bag and I bumped the knees and ankles of those standing around as I struggled to get to my feet while the bus was bouncing around.

Just as I was nearly in a completely upright position and reaching up to reclaim my rope strap, the bus lurched again. And I was sent to my knees in between the legs of this man. Again. This time my chin actually bounced off of his thigh.

"Oh, my God. I'm so sorry," I gasped. He shifted around uncomfortably and looked out the window.

"Dude, if you wanted to suck him off so bad why didn't you just say so?" I heard one young guy snicker to his friends.

So, um. Yeah. Did I mention I have a car now?

Squirt

I had a MUNI incident yesterday on the M train. This one's not that funny. It's downright...nasty.

I was traveling from San Francisco State University to CAPS downtown at about 1:30 in the afternoon. The train wasn't very crowded at all. I had piles of stuff with me--laptop, shoulder bag, lunch, etc. I sat in one of the seats facing forward by the door, and my attention was mostly engrossed by responding to text messages. My hand, my poor left hand, was holding onto the metal bar in front of me while I futzed around.

At one of the underground stations a man got on and stood directly in front of me. He had created this sort of pulley system for garbage bags and had them hanging around his neck--one large one on each side. He had a long trench coat on, and as he stood in front of me I noticed him fiddling around underneath his coat and behind his garbage bags. I briefly wondered why he was standing so close, but quickly went back to what I was doing.

A couple moments later I felt the results of what he'd done on my left hand. When he, um, got me I looked up thinking at first that something warm had just been spilled on me. It turns out it had, except that it was this man's seed. I made a weird, gagging sound and jerked (Brief aside: I can't help it--I the words I choose seem to be double-edged.) my hand away. He quickly zipped up his pants under his garbage bag and hopped off the train at the next stop.

No one else seemed to notice what had happened with the exception of the fact like I was now gazing at my left hand like it was my arch nemesis and frantically searching for a tissue in my bag.

I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed. I still feel dirty.

Other than that I had a really good (long) day yesterday. My students were a great deal of fun.

"Know when to run, motherfucker!"

Two For One

Overheard on the bus (from a man with throw pillows fastened around his entire body):

"Back to Sarajevo, moron! I'm Chinese, motherfucker! Your ignorance is not my problem. Kiss my dirty white ass! You gotta know when to hold 'em. Know when to fold 'em. Know when to walk away. And know when to run, motherfucker! You're an ignorant slut!"

Loveliness:

Tonight I saw a prescreening of one of the sweetest movies I've seen in quite sometime, Son of Rambow. I reccomend it highly.

"I hope you blink before I do."

A fight.

The scene I watched unfold on the bus this morning has stayed with me all day.

Scott and I were on the bus going to get brunch, and a fight broke out between several Latino teenage boys in the back of the bus. We weren't far away from them but we didn't see how it started because we were talking.

All of a sudden they all sprung into action and one boy in particular was screaming, "You fucked up, nigga!" repeatedly. One boy was shoved down into a seat and several others were all-out wailing on him. He had his arms up to protect his head and face as they punched and kicked him over and over. One jumped up on top of the seats and was stomping down on him as hard as he could.

The other passengers fled--some jumped off the bus, most ran up toward the front. I knew that I should probably move because there was no telling what one of them would pull out, but I stood transfixed. I was so startled by the fury and hate in these boys.

The bus driver never did anything. Eventually the boy being ganged up on got away and jumped off the bus. He took off running only to emerge next to the bus again a few blocks down the road. All the passengers groaned. The boys in the back screamed and spat at him until the next stop. Then they jumped off the bus and chased him awhile before getting back on.

They were jubilant. They grabbed their dicks and recounted their versions of the fight to each other. They shouted at teenagers on other buses we passed, "We fucked him up!" They imitated the various punches and kicks that had taken place while periodically spitting on the floor.

I learned later that it had been a fight between the Bloods and the Crips. It seemed strange to be in the presence of members of these gangs I've been hearing about for years.

Maybe it sounds really boring and psychology-y, but I kept wondering, "What made them this way? Had they been loved and cared for? Did someone comfort them when they were little and hurt themselves? Had they themselves been treated they way they were treating the boy they were beating on? What would it take to change them? Was it already too late?"

A memory.

I told this story a couple of days ago, and the memory of it was so vivid to me while I was telling it that I can't stop re-living it. I thought I'd document it here.

In the late winter/early spring of 1994, I was a junior in high school. I had recently turned 17 and was living with my father and preparing to take the standardized tests that would get me into college. I can remember it so well--Beck's "Loser" was everywhere on the radio and MTV and Nirvana's In Utero had recently come out. (I so often use music as benchmarks for when various things in my life were happening.)

That year, my high school basketball team had made it to the state championship, and hundreds of people from Bridgeport were making the two-hour drive down to Charleston to watch the game. I was riding with D. J. and his sister Lea Ann--both of whom were in the band with me--and their mother, Barbara. Before leaving the house that morning, I had cut up a bunch of vegetables as a snack to share: carrots, celery, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes.

They came to pick me up and we got on the road, heading south on I-79. It was a cold and frosty morning. There was no snow, but all the puddles and small streams were frozen. We chattered in the car and listened to the radio. Lea Ann and I sat in the back, and I remember looking ahead as we saw cars crossing the upcoming bridge start to fish-tail. Barbara said something along the lines of, "The bridge must be really slippery," and gently tapped the break to slow us down.

We thought we were okay, but once we got onto the bridge the rear end of our car started to swerve and slide. The guard-rail on the side of the bridge wasn't very tall, and we were heading sideways toward it. The outer edge of the bridge was on my side of the car. I can still remember seeing it come closer and closer, and I remember wondering if there was land or water below. We thought we were going over.

It really did seem to happen in slow motion.

Lea Ann and I fell together in the center of the back seat and clung to each other in terror. My face was buried in Lea Ann's hair. I can still remember the taste of it in my mouth. She whimpered, "Amie..." in my ear.

The car slammed off the guard-rail, and then shot back across the road, through the median, and into the oncoming traffic on the other side. We slammed into the guard-rail on the other side of the interstate and eventually came to rest in the center median.

Lea Ann and I let go of one another looked around in confusion. I remember thinking, "Thank God we didn't go over," followed by, "There's cucumbers everywhere..." The cucumbers I'd sliced were stuck all over the windows, seats, and ceiling of the car.

We slowly climbed out of the car, blinking, trying to process what had happened, and asking each other, "Are you alright? Are you hurt?"

"I am drowning
There is no sign of land
You are coming down with me
Hand in unlovable hand..."

A little squirt

Today as the 38 Geary bus was stopped for what seemed like forever on some corner in the 'Loin (Leavenworth? Larkin?) I gazed out the window. There was a large tattooed man hosing off the sidewalk in front of an apartment building. I was absently gazing at the dirt that the stream of water washed from the sidewalk when he squirted it directly at the bus window in front of my face. I laughed and he grinned.

Playful people make me happy.

Classic MUNI

This morning I somehow discovered I managed to let my iPod completely die, so I had to ride the bus downtown without my tunes to filter out the world.

I'm so glad. There were all kinds of things going down on the 38 today.

It started with an elderly man with a cane that got on at 25th Ave. He sat in the seat immediately behind me and started muttering and singing to himself in Russian. Soon he began saying to himself very softly something that sounded like, "Sweet. Sweet wheat."

I turned my head to the side so that I could better discern what he was saying, and he started saying it louder. Then he got up and hobbled over to the seat across the aisle from me. He perched on the edge of his seat and stared straight at me. I met his eyes and he stared back, murmuring to himself. Then he slowly looked me up and down, all the time repeating "Sweet. Sweet wheat."

Does "sweet wheat" mean something in Russian that I'm unaware of? Like "dirty whore"?

Anyway, he got off at Arguello and turned on the sidewalk and looked back at me, his lips still moving.

There were two men sitting together in the back of the bus. From what I could tell, it appeared that one was some type of care-giver and was escorting the other one (who was older and much more disheveled-looking) somewhere--maybe to some type of appointment. The escortee talked the whole time, and a large portion of what he wanted to talk about seemed to be Michael Jackson.

"Do you think that Michael Jackson really had sex with all those boys?"

"I had a book by Michael Jackson called Michael Jackson Was My Lover. Michael Jackson found out about it and bought up all the copies, so it's no longer on the market. But I had a copy and it was disgusting."

"Do you know that Michael Jackson bought up all the Beatles' songs?"

Most of the time I couldn't hear his companion's responses, but at one point I did hear him ask, "Why are you telling me these things?" The man replied, "I'm just making conversation." They got off together at Van Ness.

There was also what I believe was a Tibetan monk sitting a couple of seats in front of me. He'd gotten on at Park Presidio, and sat serenely in his seat. At one point a man came up to him, knelt on the floor, and bowed to him. They proceeded to begin a quiet conversation during which the man would periodically bow. At Powell, they got off the bus together.

Thank God I didn't miss these things.

No, I will not hold your Vienna sausages.

Minor bus incident:

I was on the 38 Geary today, and a pretty rough-looking man was struggling to get on the back of the bus by sticking his arm inside the door, pushing the handle to get it open, and dragging large garbage bags of recycling up the steps. I was standing near this back door as he was getting on with a Vienna sausage pursed between his lips and a couple more clenched tightly in his gloved hands as he tried to hoist his bags up the stairs. As he braced himself against the door to keep it open, he looked up at me and asked (with his lips still pressing down on the sausage in his mouth), “Will you hold my sausages?”

I am inclined to be helpful and, reflexively, started to reach my hand out to take them, caught another glimpse at the shiny pink saliva-covered one between his lips, and thought better of it.

“I’m sorry,” I said apologetically, as I withdrew my hand.

“Bitch,” he muttered out of the corner of his mouth as he continued the drawn out process of getting on the bus.

I felt like I should offer him a reason. I’m a vegetarian? I just sneezed into my hand? I just petted a dog? I have a contagious skin disease? And then I felt a little indignant that I should feel compelled to give this man a reason. Besides the weird situation and being called a bitch, Vienna sausages are gross. Period. I don’t want to hold one ever.

"My love is..."

This morning I was on the bus going to work, and I was only about 3 stops from my destination. An older, shabbily dressed man got on the bus and took the seat directly in front of me. At first glance I thought he was homeless and (I'm a little ashamed to admit) I immediately braced myself to hold my breath. But he smelled just fine. He sat down and turning diagonally in his seat and opened up a large sketch pad. There were words beautifully scrawled all over every page.

I was immediately intrigued. Of course I had to take a peek.

He was just aimlessly leafing through his pages, and it was hard for me to read more than a word or two. Some pages appeared to be lists, others seemed to be essays, and still other looked like poems. On the first three pages, the title "My Love is..." was written at the top, and many, many sentences were written below it. I was dying to read that. Was he describing the love he has to give? Or was he describing the characteristics of a person he considered to be his love?

As he continued to flip through the pages I caught several titles: "Dreamer," "Nature Walk," "Maiden," and "Lamp Light." On one page I caught one lone sentence that struck me: "The happiest moments in my life were spent quietly against your breast."

At that moment I loved that man. Loved that he was bursting with things to express and needed to get them down on paper. Loved that he read back through it. Loved that (did I imagine this?) he was holding it in such a way that others could look at it, too.

How?

I was sitting next to an elderly Asian man on the bus today, and I noticed that he was reading from a list on a small, folded piece of white paper. The words were in tiny and precise writing. The title at top was "How?" Underneath was a long list of bulleted points. Being quite the list-maker myself, I was incredibly curious. The first three read:

How do you open a bottle?
How do you make orange juice?
How do I dream in English?

I immediately whipped out a little book in which to jot them down so I wouldn't forget. I was totally intrigued but having trouble making out anything beyond the first three items. When a single seat opened up he got up and moved--perhaps he sensed me reading and taking notes over his shoulder?--and I felt desperate to see the rest of that list.

I found myself plotting how I could get another look. I fantasized about snatching it out of his hand and running with it. (Is that completely wrong?) I figured I could just get up and go stand beside him at his new seat, although that would be pretty obvious. As I was determining that I did not actually care if it was obvious, he got off at Judah.

And now I will never know.

The Tire Store of Truth

When I ride the 31 Balboa bus home in the evenings--which I do most weekday evenings--we pass a tire store in the Tenderloin (a not-so-great neighborhood) that I've come to think of as the "tire store of truth." It's not much to look at, even for a tire store, but they have a large sign in the corner of the parking lot. Every couple of months the letters of this sign are changed to make a new quote. Most of them strike me as bizarre quotes to find in such a dismal location, but it cheers me up every time I see one.

Three of the most recent quotes:

"Show me a sane man and I'll cure him." (Carl Jung)

"Martyrdom is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability." (George Bernard Shaw)

"If we saw ourselves in others there could not be war." (Unknown)

I always wait with anticipation to find out what the next quote will be. Someday I want to jump off the bus and go inside to find the person who takes this initiative. I want to know how he/she chooses the quotes, and whether they are open to suggestions for others. I think it could be taken to a whole new level.