I’ve been using public transportation a lot lately. My car broke down over a month ago. I decided to sell it instead of fixing it. I never really liked it and I didn’t really know what was wrong. My sister decided that she’d like to have it. It is really pretty but it’s a pain in my ass. So I was more than happy to cut her a deal and let her buy it. After selling it, I bought myself a nice shiny new bus pass.
I live pretty close to downtown. I’m right on a bus line. It’s way more eco friendly to ride the bus. I also have a bike that just needs the tires aired up and I think she’s ready to go, not to mention, my perfectly good feet. I can walk most places if I need to. I’m content in all those reasons.
Flea Market Guy can’t comprehend how I’m so content not having a car. He thinks cars are a necessary evil for living a productive life. And while that is true for him, because he uses his car all day long for work, I sit at a computer all day long. My expenses just went down by a couple hundred dollars a month between insurance, gas, and general maintenance. A bus pass for the whole month is $50. And if I do need a vehicle, FMG still has one and I can drive his if I need to do anything major.
Plus, you meet a lot of interesting people on the bus. I was telling someone that I was planning on not having a car for all of 2020 and just using public transportation and she said that I should work on a book called, “A Year On KAT” (that’s our bus system). I told her I didn’t think that was a terrible idea and maybe I would.
While riding the other day, I was on the platform waiting for my second bus to arrive. It was cold and it was rainy. They have these little pockets of heat that you can go in to warm up and the lights are like those heated shower lights you sometimes stumble upon in a cheap motel or an apartment built in the 70’s. I don’t know why we ever went away from those. Anyway, theirs are pretty powerful. You could probably get a tan if you stood under it long enough. So I went into the little heated area and there were two older people sitting down. The lady was in her 60’s. The man was well into his 70’s if I had to guess. They rode the bus together a lot. They lived on the same route but in two different places. I was going to my mother’s house so it’s not a bus I frequent. But I got to talking to both of them and it turns out they were both Veterans. She was marines. He was army. They argued back and forth about which one was better. They never came to a resolution.
Whenever you tell someone that you are a writer, more times than not, they will reply with “I’ve been told I should write a book about my life.” I always reply, “well, you probably should then.” I don’t really think my life is interesting enough to write a whole book that anyone would want to read. I blog just because it helps me get things off my chest, there’s not a whole bunch of people who want to read my day to day life. Unless I start talking about blow jobs and sex and then people are super tuned in. Anyway, we got to talking about her book and she said she was dyslexic and couldn’t write it. I suggested she record it. She said she tried once and her brother destroyed it because he didn’t want her airing all of the family’s dirty laundry which included rape, incest, and molestation by her father and brothers. She was the only girl. I, of course, then quoted one of my favorite writers and told the lady, “well, in the famous words of Anne Lamott, if people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
She agreed and said that maybe one day she would write her story. Or record it and have it transcribed. I hope she does. I hope that everyone who feels they have a story to tell eventually writes it down. Even if it just gets stuck in a bedside drawer and never found until years after their death.
It makes me sad when I think of the stories I’ll never get to read. But I guess that’s just the romantic in me.
RouletteWeekend 