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Michael considered fate at 00:03   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

Caught my ferry and caught the one on the way back, too. Funny how much I worry about stuff like that. Catching the bus. Catching that flight. Catching the meeting. My whole life.. all it's anxiety is based in these things. Could be a lot worse, I suppose. Worrying about making the rent or even getting my next paycheck. Could be worrying about where to get my next meal and how I'm gonna get the kids through school. Could be worrying about the cancer eating away on the inside or society eating away at the outside.. and here I'm worrying about catching the bus.

I shouldn't complain at all.

Sometimes it amazes me that Tony never writes about missing the bus.. it being the busblog and all. He'll write about the route, the weather, all the crazy people on the bus, and where he's going but he never ever mentions missing the bus.

But what I really wonder about is what makes everyone else's clock tick. I know what makes mine tick (beer and some mac and cheese, mostly) but I don't know about anyone else. I don't know what other people worry about. Some people seem to get upset about the oddest things. Lost keys and spilt milk. I don't get it all the time.. but maybe those people aren't worried about missing the bus?

I don't really know why I worry so much about missing the bus cause it hardly ever happens. The last time I missed a bus was about 6 years ago. It was cold and miserable at about 2:30AM in the morning out on the south shore near Montreal. It was January maybe and we'd just gotten out of some local bar that had this band play, Spirit of the West. They were good and lively and had the celtic flair and all but the McDonalds food before hand sort of did a number on most of us and by the time we got to the bus stop everyone but me had purged there systems in one way or another. I was just feeling like shit. We showed up at the bus stop, 2:35AM maybe, only to realize the night bus ran every hour, not every half hour, and the last time it ran was 2:30. Off by just 5 minutes. Almost an entire hour we waited on the edge of the highway staring into the wind.. It was pushing 10 below that night, maybe more with the wind chill... and that's about the time it hit me. Big grumbling complaints from the lower region. Gaseous exodus in frightful volume. Churning of the most uncomfortable kind. It became quite apparent quite quickly that I would not be able to wait the 40 or so minutes for the bus let alone the 35 minute bus ride back into the downtown core. It was certainly questionable, too, whether I would be able to trek the mile back through suburbia to the bar in order to make a deposit and manage to make it back in time for the bus. Heck.. i wasn't even sure I could walk 300 feet, let alone a mile or two.

At this point we were right off the highway near some commercial buildings. Store fronts and a bank, maybe, but not much else. It was sort of desolate, really, with ice covering everything. It was a bad winter and the snow was plowed up into berms higher than I was on either side of the road. The freezing rain from a few nights before had left a hard shell on everything and it glimmered in the light of the street lamps.

"Over there," one of my friends said, pointing at a narrow alley with a dumpster

"No, try that place," another said, suggesting a darkened store entrance.

I hobbled around the back of a smaller building and found a bit of privacy on the back stoop where two snow banks created a sort of "room" with the back door. Sure there was no roof, the wind was blowing at 10 knots, and it was 3:00AM in the morning, but at this point I wasn't going to start getting picky.

I was quick about things and managed to keep everything well away from me and my clothes. If I didn't take thermodynamics I'd swear it froze before it hit the ground. It was at once a hardened pile or puddle - the leftovers of a disagreement that happened up in my stomach, rolled out the back like a bar brawl into an alley, into my lower intestines, and finally.. well.. out onto the back stoop of an unfortunate business near the highway in the Montreal suburb of Pointe-Clair.

But let me tell you it made me feel a whole heck of a lot better. The bus rumbled up almost as I was pulling my pants up. I rushed across the street and luckily the bus was fairly empty since my group of friends quarantined me to the back of the bus while they made drunken faces at me from the front.

If we had made the 2:30 bus I would have exploded half way into Montreal. Maybe near Saint-Henri or thereabouts. I would have had to crumble in the back of the bus, or pull the chain and rush out into the street to explode mid-step (wish I have done, in technicolour beauty, as you all know, if you read regularly.. but that was at a lumberjack competition). If I had made that bus I'd be down a pair of pants and maybe a pair of friends and public transit would be that much worse for wear.

Even when I miss the bus it works out for the better. And I'm complaining?