BLOGGO

Stupid bus.

Sometimes the stupid bus feels like it will never stupid come.

The steel bench doesn’t help. Its cold, hard ways do not a good sit make. You see people intervene with objects, trying to improve the comfort. Newspapers, sweaters, cardboard, foam, their hands, but usually not cereal.

If you’re the older woman who catches the 61 at the base of the Pulaski Bridge, cereal is not off-limits.

The bus was never coming. I was sitting on the steel bunch bench waiting for the 61. A woman came and sat next to me. She soon agreed that the 61 was going to be awhile. She wasn’t going to endure without some adjustments. In my peripheral vision, and to the tune of Artie Shaw’s My Blue Heaven that was coming in through my iPod, I watched this woman take out a big box of Rice Krispies cereal from her bag of groceries and stick it under her rump and crush down onto it. I marveled at her gumption and wondered if this was a tried and true method or was she inventing on the fly. Whatever the case, it was working.

For about 30 seconds. Then it wasn’t.

The bag let out a sharp pop, the cardboard swung open its gates, and a stream of rice krispies cascaded to the cold sidewalk below, lowering her slowly to the bench surface. And suddenly bus 61 roared upon us, lending some added craziness to the scene.

She tried to save what she could of her cereal and published the right emotion to the situation: she started cackling.

“AHHHHHHHH! It broke!”, she yelled and smiled at me.

“I was impressed you made it that long!”, I encouraged.

Then we both scrambled to ready our metrocards and join the line of others, some who saw the rice krispy scene and others who did not.

While sleeping maybe?

That’s when your “counter world”, the one that mirrors beneath, stride for stride, thought for thought, seeps in, making dreams feel real but fake when you wake. Having you more than a little suspicious about it all. The worlds pantomime well for the most part, harmonic themes and exchanges, big to little, the changes. But there are breaches, occasionally. Like the goose I caught, thrusting through on a quiet street in leafy Vermont. Several nervous seconds later, she was gone. The grass spread a green patch over the hole. I waited a few minutes. I heard a honk, but it was a car. I heard a bark, but it was a smiling dog trying his best to sound like a goose.

“The photo shows Joseph Bernazard crouched in the supermarket vestibule in a black-and-gray baseball cap, his upraised right hand pressing the point of a serrated knife against a woman’s neck, his left hand pulling her to him by her hair so as to make her a shield.

“Kill me! Kill me now! I want to die!” his captive remembers him shouting.”

–

After the crime scene tape came down, the Met manager, Pumsu Kim, had his men wash the blood and tissue from the vestibule. Kim cut up boxes and lay a carpet of cardboard over the wet pavement as a woman came up with a very healthy looking toddler in a stroller.

“Are you doing deliveries?” the woman asked.

“Yes,” Kim said.

The street again filled with people going to the restaurants and shops.

NEWSPAPER GUY TELLS ABOUT IT 

I don’t know what photo he’s talking about in the above excerpt.  Police evidence?  My photo is taken from behind yellow tape that obstructed a morning coffee stroll with a friend.  Later I read what felt like a cliché. A man is treated at the hospital for hearing voices and ends up “escaping” from the hospital. The next morning he runs around my neighborhood doing dangerous things to others, eventually inviting death to be part of his life. “Death by cop”, I’ve heard it called. Bait the police into killing you.

You walk past the store front now and there are posters wrapped around the light pole out front that pay tribute to the troubled guy who wanted to die. One scrawling message is from someone who signed off as “your future wife”.

And some clichés are dodged. I presided over a wedding that steered clear of the typical matrimonial elements, allowing the event to be theirs, tatooing their personas to the day.  “you may kiss the bride” was the exception to the cliché-free ceremony. But in the end, derivative as life is, it is tough to kill the clichés.

for my black bag to enter from backstage onto the carousel (with no applause…I always felt like they were little performers entering the “scene”…) I consider just watching it pass me on its meandering slow path under the anxious gaze of hungry shoppers. maybe avoid it…let it cycle through…taunt it with de-possession.  I like that no one can detect I let a bag of my own slip through. Even when I’m staring RIGHT AT IT, no one knows.

no one seriously hurt, otherwise I wouldn’t have colored it red.

no one hurt here either.