Thursday, October 31, 2002

Maybe I should be concerned

Maybe I should be concerned that so much of what I find noteworthy in my quotidian life occurs on or around the bus.  Then again, if I don’t want to engage in gossip or onanism, most of my contact with the world happens during these two parts of my workdays.  There’s very little value to writer or reader in an lengthy description of me staring at my computer monitor or legal pad for several hours at a shot, with exciting (by contrast) but very occasional and abbreviated field trips to the washroom.  So I find myself on the bus again, and the experience tends to set the tone (in the morning to work) for my days and (in the evening back home) nights.  This may be why the execretory bookend day stands out for me. 

When I woke up I was on the ol’ 38L inbound, comfortably ensconced in a plastic seat that faced into the center of the bus.  A crowd of commuters lined the aisle, reading or listening to music or staring blankly forward… I noticed that the fellow right in front of me was carrying a black canvas attache case with my college seal on it.  That’s a school that isn’t well represented here on the left coast and I had such a good time there I’m always happy to see evidence of it in strange places, so I was favorably disposed to this tall, somewhat overweight, headphone wearing fellow.  Until I smelled the rankness of his flatulence.  It was just past 8 am and it seemed he’d been breakfasting on vulcanized rubber and fried sulphur.  His butt was broad and smug and about ten inches from my face.  I was choking on the thickness of the stench.  I don’t know if or when it ever dissipated; it seemed I could still nearly taste it hours later. 

My day did not particularly shine; it barely met my extremely modest expectations at the high point and then deteriorated until I forced myself to leave the office, later than I wanted to, later than I ought to have.  My jaw was clenched but the last hours of daylight savings sunlight still lit the sky, which shone a rich azure above me, a pale pink at the horizon towards which I walked two blocks to Transbay Terminal.  A small group was already waiting for a 38L that was loitering several yards away to come on down to the platform and whisk us away to a brighter future.  We waited together.  We continued waiting for longer than I thought was appropriate.  Then the starlings started to arrive.  (I think they’re starlings.  These are little black birds that flock together in a mass, a shape that twists and floats on the wind, bending and shifting but never breaking.) There was a flock of about fifty, flapping in unison, swerving madly as one, an enormous airborne amoeba on crank, swooping and dispersing and reuniting in a cohesive unit.  Another flock of about fifty joined them, and then several more cognizable masses of birds - soon there were hundreds, maybe a thousand of them, black against the cupric blueness of the sky, performing acrobatic feats and taking our breath with the beauty of their formations.  We all stood in the gathering cool and watched them spin and flutter and somehow maintain a unitary contiguity.  I’ve always loved starlings in flight and these ones were putting on one hell of a show.  I was feeling better about my fart-started day.  Then I felt the cold wet impact as cloacal waste descended from on high to strike me on the cheek.  Birdshit splashed onto my glasses, ran down the side of my face.  My mouth, incredibly, had been closed, so the damage was limited to external applications only.  I wiped off the chunks with the shoulder of my jacket and a fellow commuter offered me, with impressive solemnity, a paper napkin.  I tidied up as best I could and stepped forward to a muni worker to ask when that damn bus would stop idling and get me away from target practice central.  When my day starts as mine did, I guess I should expect it to end as it did.  Execretory bookends.  At least I maintained personal control of my bodily functions.  So things could have been worse.  Now that I think about it, they could have been a lot worse.  So I cheerfully retract the above rant.