City Busses

Everybody is staring as hard as they can out of their respective windows. The handicapped ramp is slowly lifting the twisted body of an old woman in her wheelchair up to the bus's entrance. Another woman wearing a teal and fuchsia windbreaker, who always accompanies and who I have assumed to be her daughter, waits behind. Once boarded, she counts out change for the both of them, two sets of $1.35 clicking like pebbles through the machine.

There is always an embarrassed scramble when we stop by the trailer park to pick up this woman and her elderly mother. The other patrons of the bus move as quickly as they can without actually looking at their source of repulsion. The bus driver - and this is one reason I believe he is a father - gently waves the lounging college students out of their front seats without a hint of annoyance. I always sit just in front of the side door of the bus, close to the front but never so forward that I have to move for the handicapped and elderly that technically have priority.

"Everybody to the back," he calls, sometimes through a microphone. "Everybody, make some room."

This bus drive is my favorite. He is younger, probably in his mid-30s, and has that kindly blank and sandpaper blond head of a father with little girls and a schoolteacher wife. He doesn't wear a name tag; the bus drivers never do. Donning his fingerless work gloves, he secures the older women's wheelchair to the floor with carabiners and vinyl straps. The presumed daughter looks on, gently stroking the wispy silver hairs floating from her chin.

The battle for ownership of the public transportation system in our better-than-average midwestern cities is played out every day we pick up this waddling and rolling pair. I'm one member of the college student team, those of us amassing student debt and putting off car payments and through the beauty of tax breaks getting our bus passes for free. That's what we feel the bus should be: our domain, for cool young environmentalists and hip kids between bike routes.
But every Wednesday this speechless woman waddles out from her trailer park, wheelchaired and indeterminately ailing parent in tow, and invades our territory and reminds us that busses really are for the poor. Busses are for those who cannot and never will be able to afford a car, but can scratch together fare whenever they need to get to a doctor's appointment or the unemployment agency.

And on Tuesdays we stop by the mall and pick up the 45-year-old McDonald's worker who always chats up the bus driver, asking about kids in elementary and sick grandmothers with breast cancer. And on Mondays we pick up the 7-foot tall man who stares at his gloves and hollers Stevie Wonders songs in the back.

The older woman nods her head into her chest, a line of spittle trailing onto the front of her fourth of July embroidered sweatshirt. Her daughter has seated herself just behind her in my aisle, and I only get a brief glimpse of the patchy red skin spreading across her neck before she turns around. Our eyes meet and we stare without smiling, her eyes widening behind her square glasses. We are utterly foreign to each other, but for now we are both going to keep our seats.

Flying

I love airports, not as homogenized wastelands but as the outer heartbeats of our societies, the great equalizer, better than poverty. I adore them purely because they make people feel weird. We are almost forced to become blank-eyed daydreamers, not content to ignore our seatmates or close elbow-bumping neighbors at one of the dozens of European rip-off cafes and food court plastic bakeries. Travelers in airports are forced to experience each other, to make judgements and sneer and smell each other's overnight travel without-a-shower body stink. To be annoyed at each other's crying 10 month olds or in awe of how much luggage we carry, or perplexed by how we can travel in high heels or such an obviously uncomfortable suit. To sit down in a straight backed grey lobby waiting chair and see our mirror image wearing a vintage hat and brightly colored sneakers, sitting across from us.

Nobody has access to the clean beds and showers awaiting priority premium members in the bowels of the airport, in the Admiral's Club or Sky Mall or whatever it is. I don't know anyone with a special pass or a frequent flyer miles card. Maybe I just haven't yet graduated to that level of successful über-traveler yet – flying twice to four times a year with train rides and plenty of bussing in between isn't as dedicated to the romantic notion of interstate travel as I would have hoped. Maybe someday I'll come to understand the true hierarchy of the traveler, from the lowly newbie who gets sick at takeoff to the seasoned pro who has his shoes and belt off before he even receives his boarding pass. That realization could still await me somewhere between LAX and JFK.

But I prefer to think that travel, far from being yet another designation that divides us from our fellow man with secret codewords, swiped cards and privileges, is just another equalizer. Stripped of possessions, family and friends, shoes and liquids above three ounces, forced to adhere to the inexorable and wholly fallible schedule of giant, swooning whales-in-the-sky, we all are one and small. No amount of mortgage payments, paid-by-the-hour salary jobs, maids or wives, divorces or college degrees, will let you make your connection in O'Hare if the plane is late coming from Dallas/Fort Worth. Nothing and no amount of well-articulated pleading or polished leather shoes will make your overly salty Cobb salad cost less then $12.08. Or make your carry-on bag dig less into your shoulder, or make it possible for you to stay fully clothed in the security line. An airport is a huge suppurating wound of forced rules and heightened paranoia. Inside it, each one of us is just a passing fad, a terror subject, tired and smelly, dehydrated and feeling purely like our flight is never going to arrive to carry us to blessed home.

I get a better change of having a window seat on tiny, miniature flights across Lake Michigan. There are no video screens or television projections at the front of the cabin, so one tired flight attendant pantomime a fastening and tightening a seat belt, holding the vinyl belt high above her head so all fifteen of us passengers can see. Her name is Anna Marie, and with her close-cropped carrot hair she looks older than my mother. She cracks familiar jokes about Michigan weather and has never had the burden, or maybe the privilege, of having to push a clunky beverage cart along the narrow aisles of these hour-long flights.

I always feel morbidly zen as the plane rears and sputters for take off. All the most horrible painful visions of water, fire, choking loss of cabin pressure and being torn limb from limb fly through my mind as the rumbling builds slowly then with monstrous force underneath me, sending shockwaves of thrill up my legs and I think, well, it wouldn't be so bad. Death is oblivion and at least my notebook, my luggage both literal and otherwise would be sunk, burned, destroyed along with me. Besides the bruises pressed on the weeping hearts of those who loved me or at least wished they had, I would simply be erased out of existence. It really doesn't sound too bad.

But the plane keeps rumbling and taxiing faster and faster and preparing for lift off and just as my zen calm breaks and I want to tear off my seatbelt just like Anna Marie showed me and shout no, let me off! GOD DAMN IT LET ME OFF and dig my soft fingernails into the navy blue pleather crinkled seat and everything bursts into flame, the plane exhales one more final orgasmic push and we leave earth and the plane certainly gets off but I don't. We're in flight and I see the sprinkled caramel lights of Chicago go lopsided diagonal outside my window and I'm stuck for the next forty five minutes until we reach Kalamazoo, so I sink back defeated and desexed into my seat.

I will probably and promptly fall asleep, just so I don't have to obsess over the way the wing outside my window rattles and shakes in the gusty Lake Michigan breezes. Goodbye Chicago, next time I will stay awhile, I promise. For now I stay in pure transit, as I sail so weightlessly, so effortlessly above this northern coast of Illinois. Below me the world is lit up like Christmas, all adorned in gold and silver, and I am still a child, not bitter, staring hungrily out the window, palm flat against the Pyrex, hoping for an explosion to force me out and send me careering out to join the universe in all its cool, dim splendor.

Hmm.

I am considering making this a real blog again. Really, it will just be a better version of my writing blog; mostly because I'm not hip enough to use a Tumblr.

This is the view from my apartment, facing Drake Street (Avenue? I'm not really sure). There is something austerely beautiful about Michigan in the winter, though at the moment I have had quite die Nase voll of it.

Creative writings to follow. Perhaps this will prompt me to fire my Twitter account once and for all (but probably not).

Red carpet/violetter Teppich

Ich habe immer noch keine Ahnung, warum es einen ganz violetten Teppich in einer Gasse in Salzburg gab. Was für ein Eingang, glaube ich. Für die wichtigen Personen, vielleicht, oder könnte auch sein, dass der Teppich nur für die Touristen so liegt, damit haben sie einen wunderbaren ersten Blick von Salzburg, von Österreich, Europa, der westlichen Welt. Wohin führt dieser grelle Teppich? Ich weiß gar nicht. Ich bin darauf nicht hingelaufen. Wenn ich die Farbe bemerkte, war ich schon am Ende der Linie.

Fall an!

Hehe. Die Gänse werden die Welt eines Tages übernehmen. Sie können eigentlich nicht erwarten.

Verkehr

Als ich junger war, gab ich all mein Hoffung, Träumen, Zukunft und Ideen der Stadt - eigentlich wollte ich nur in eine große Stadt mit noch größeren Gebäuden und Wolkenkratzer gehen. Ich wusste gar nicht, wie ich das machen konnte. Zum Fuß? Im Beifahrersitz Autos meines Freunds? Mit einem Fahrrad? Ich dachte nur, dass ich das so schnelle wie möglich machen sollte. Aber hier bin ich, noch in der Nähe von einer großen Stadt, aber ich bin bequem da trotzdem.

der gebende Baum

Als ich ein Kind war, sieht Natur so zauber aus. Ich wünschte, dass Bäume, Pflanzen und Tiere sprechen können. Sie wären meine Freunde. Ich wünschte, dass ich stundenlang den ganzen Tag mit einem Heft und Kuli, vielleicht nur ein Buch oder vielleicht nichts dabei draußen sitzen könnte. Ich wollte nie die eigentliche Welt anmelden, weil ich das Gefühl nicht lösen könnte, dass ich da nicht hingehörte. Jetzt vielleicht glaube ich gegenteilig, aber ich fühle mich dieselbe, wenn ich unter einem Baum in der Sonne sitze und lese und denke und mir vorstelle.