Waiting for the Bus

It's amazing how little it looked like things had changed. From a seat at the downtown bus terminal it looked like a normal slice of Americana. The to-ing and fro-ing of people as they went to school or work or shopping seemed much as I imagined it always had. Of course, there probably weren't as many suits back when there was gas to be had and commuting was a way of life for most of us. I wouldn't know; I was one of those commuters, happily driving back and forth in comfort. There were fewer suits then, I suppose, but damned sure fewer soldiers and cops with automatic weapons.

One of the soldiers walked by, barely looking at me. He was barely out of his teens and his focused lack of interest betrayed his boredom eloquently. It was the look of someone who didn't really know what he was doing, or why, only that there were orders to be followed. I felt sorry for him. When politicians make stupid decisions, whether it's starting wars or passing laws that are clearly immoral, if not illegal, it's kids like him that end up doing the shit work. Maybe he signed up out of some idea of patriotism or just because he was broke, but he sure as hell didn't sign up expecting to patrol a bus terminal and maybe shoot some citizen that wouldn't toe the line. Or maybe he did. Hard as it is to believe, there had to be some Americans that approved of the martial law, the curfews, and the travel restrictions. After all, the jerks that supported those laws kept getting elected and even the people who yelled "voter fraud" couldn't deny that some people were voting for them.

I sighed and turned to watch the crazy guy. That's one thing that I know hadn't changed. We used to call them "RW" for "resident weirdo": the borderline crazies, mostly harmless, who panhandled or just hung around public spaces. That still wasn't illegal and, given the number of homeless and unemployed the ironically named "New Prosperity Act" was creating, wasn't likely to be. This particular RW looked rather normal, if unkempt, save for the constant dancing and off-key singing that didn't seem nearly so odd until you noticed that the cord of his headphone wasn't connected to anything. As the soldier passed, for an instant the craziness melted away from the RW, like Clark Kent melting into Superman in that old movie, and in that moment he looked directly at me and quirked an eyebrow at me and nodded almost imperceptibly toward the soldier. Then just as quickly he morphed back into the dancing crazy.

Heart pounding, I stood up, grabbed my bag, and walked as calmly as I could away from the station. I had to get to the dead drop. The movement was starting.

Waiting for A Bus - 6/15/11

I pulled out my water bottle about fifteen minutes after we'd left Tegucigalpa and offered him a sip. He'd looked kinda tense, distracted, and then took the bottle, drank, handed it back and pulled me in for a long kiss.
"Honey, you know, if anything ever happens - you know, with all this - you should totally pretend that you can't speak Spanish, and head for the U.S. Embassy, okay?
I laughed, waving the Spanish verb primer that I'd been perusing at him - "So, I shouldn't put this in the outer pocket of my pack?"
He leaned over and hugged me, staring out the window over my shoulder at the thick foliage passing by. "Nope, you should put that away! Really, we should be looking for blue macaws, they're all over the place around here!" He kissed me again for emphasis, so I giggled and shoved the little book in my daypack, down near the protein bars and the flotsam that doesn't get pulled out very often. We commenced staring out the window together, holding hands. The back seat of the old bus wasn't very comfortable, but at least we weren't sharing it with a bunch of chickens, school kids, or market produce, like some of the other passengers.

Then the bus stopped. Tree in the road. And the tree had been cut on purpose, I could tell. My heart lurched as a line of men in green uniforms - no insignia, I saw that too - stepped out of the trees with sub-automatics. I felt him stiffen next to me, take a shaky breath. Out of the corner of my eye, I could have sworn he was smiling for a second, just for a second.
Then raised voices in Spanish, a man on the bus ordering us out. Hands in the air. Men herded to one side of the bus, women to the other. Orders to produce passports. Shouting from the men's side of the bus, and then a shot, then more shouting that quickly stopped. Dear god, we were the only gringos there - were they after us? We were being kidnapped? My hands started shaking as I handed over my passport to the armed teenager standing in front of me, and I looked at the ground and shook my head when he asked me my name in Spanish.
"I'm sorry - I don't speak Spanish", I whispered. Then louder, "No espanol".
I was surprised when he handed the passport back to me, but took it quickly and put it in my shirt pocket.
The women around me remained silent. I kept shaking, wondering what I'd see next, when I looked up from all those deliberately unpolished black leather boots lined in front of me.

Finally, our luggage was thrown off the bus into a pile, the tree was removed, the soldiers got on, and the bus took off. My boyfriend was gone. I listened to the Hondurans and Nicaraguans talking disgustedly as they sorted through the pile and started to disperse in ones and twos in every direction. One or two of the women came up to me and put their hands on my shoulder as I stared down the road, thinking furiously.....I made replies that I don't remember, thanks, I'm okay....no, really, I'm okay. Eventually, they all left, and I was still standing in the middle of the road, with my bright-red backpack. I tugged it over to the ditch, finally, and sat on it, still thinking.

We spent the last few weeks with Nicaraguan rebels. Campesinos, with patched, mismatched, pseudo-military uniforms and soft upland voices. Polite Spanish, almost old-fashioned. Corey was a stringer for the Tico Times in Costa Rica, and we were purportedly taking a vacation while he wrote a Pulitzer-worthy piece about the rebels. We'd only been dating for six months, but Corey convinced me to come along, as his cover for the trip.
Now he was gone, and all I could think about was his prescience beforehand. That fleeting smile. The fact that the soldiers all wore identical uniforms and new boots, and that teenager with the gun said his "s's" like "th's", and the other men had shouted and used ghetto slang. American ghetto slang. The guns were new.

Goddammit, somehow I knew that fucker was working for the CIA! I couldn't believe they'd left me behind, alive. Like hell I was going to an embassy.....I heard another diesel engine grinding down the road towards me through the thick trees. Stood up, pushed back my sleeve, stuck my thumb out, and waited.

Waiting for the bus

Susan knew this was a mistake. A mistake she had been repeating every week for months now. The man she met here every Tuesday was after all a confessed killer. At first she was certain he was simply pulling her leg to pass time while they waiting for the bus. He spoke with such a casual air of brutal acts that Susan could only assume he was exercising a dark and wildly inappropriate sense of humor. He seemed so normal in every other way, a gray haired elderly gentleman of some Slavic origins with a casual smile and an endless supply of chewing gum to offer.

Clearly he must have thought it funny to tease this young woman with tales of dark deeds in his distant homeland, just waiting for her to finally call bullshit. And yet, she never did. And he never stopped. With subsequent Tuesdays his stories became more detailed and revealing. Where at first he simply alluded to events and lethal acts he later went into disturbing detail. And still Susan did not shy away but instead delved ever deeper into this alien mind. And each Tuesday his bus came and took him away to places unknown and the stories would need wait another week.

Each Tuesday she arrived as a moth to flame anxious for the next chapter in this macabre life story and each week the unassuming vaguely European gentleman arrived in his rain coat and hat in hand - as one did not wear a hat in the presence of a lady - and added to the tale. Prison camps and government affairs; secret killings and things far worse. He told his tale as one might relate the most mundane of events from the past as Susan sat hands on her palms in rapt fascination. His stories of murder and torture offered with a matter of fact delivery were received by an equally casual and captive audience. She never once shied away from the graphic details nor failed to press him for more information when something piqued her interest. They were sociopathic soul mates.

Then, one day the elderly gentleman failed to arrive at the bus stop. Susan sat in the rain until his bus came and went and finally her bus arrived. Taking one last look down the street she sighed and with resignation bordered her bus. Looking out of the window she noticed a grey sedan with grey men in grey suits drive off into the grey afternoon and she knew her Tuesday friend would never again entertain her.

Topic: Waiting for the bus

This day and age

I've seen the rise and fall of empires; of entire peoples, cultures ideas and ideals. I recall, albeit distantly, when the world was flat, the heavens perfect and regulated by the hand of God. I've seen pyramids rise in the desert and cities sink and buried beneath time and shifting sands. Ships set off over the horizon to discover new lands of wealth and opportunity.

Too have I seen the rise of technology. I've gazed awe struck as sails gave way to steam and steam in turn to gasoline. The railroad united nations, the airplane the world and telecommunications has reduced it in size from months to minutes. Science has expanded our reality to include the unbelievably small to the unimaginably vast. I sat with my friend Kepler as he fancied travel to the distant moon and later shook the hand of Armstrong.

And yet. And yet of all things I've seen transform the world around me, that which I find the most transformative of all is so very commonplace. The plow, the printing press, air travel and telephone astounding in their right pale in comparison to the internet and the emergent social media. A world of nations and diverse peoples divided by borders and distance has been replaced with a one-world neighborhood defined merely by a click of the mouse. We've traded the neighbor across the fence for the neighbor across the world. A world where distance, time and culture are inconsequential. A world forever changed.

This Day and Age

Nostalgia just ain't what it used to be.

You know, aircraft got invented three years into the twentieth century and it took over forty years before they moved on to jet propulsion. Another couple decades until the first satellite. And then, just over a decade later, we were watching men on the moon on television.

Oh, and TV, let's talk about TV. Farnsworth got TV working for real in the '30s. Thirty-five years later most of us were still watching our two or three available channels black and white TV on a mostly round tube. A decade later the TVs were color and solid state, but the screens were still tubes small. A decade after that, the first VCRs showed up. Then, within twenty years TVs were flat, sixty-inch screens, on which you could watch a couple hundred stations, which you could pause and rewind and save for later. Oh, and 3D, don't forget 3D.

Or you could just watch movies on your phone, which has a color touch-sensitive screen, can stream music, or browse a global information network that no one could have even imagined back when airplanes had propellers. Which, by the way, was a time when phones were black and had rotary dials, just like they did up until about the same time Armstrong was boogieing on the Sea of Tranquility.

Most of the tech that I had when I was a kid was pretty much completely recognizable as descendants from what my parents had when they were kids. But my kids, I have problems even explaining things that I grew up with. I mean, who the hell knows what a slide rule is anymore? Calculators were so new you weren't allowed to use them for tests when I was in college, and now the concept of a calculator that isn't an app or a function on some other gadget is so retro that it's kitsch.

Or, you can flip it around… Can you imagine trying to explain iPhones, personal computers, and the Internet as a practical reality to someone few decades ago? That was serious sci-fi stuff.

And yet… and yet, 2001 came and went and we don't have any orbiting Hilton hotels, no lunar colonies, no commercial space travel. No personal helicopters, jetpacks, CITY OF THE FUTURE or any of that amazing stuff we all thought we'd have. How is it fair that my kids think everything that I grew up with is only one step more advanced than napping flint knives and arrowheads and yet the closest I'll ever get to space travel is watching the reports of the Rich and Famous flying Virgin Galactic?

But then, I guess we can just be glad we aren't slaves to Skynet, servants of our ape masters, or eating Soylent Green, yet.

This Day and Age - 6/7/11

You'd think, in this day and age, that a body could be disposed of without much fuss. Blenders, composters, vaporizers, dehydrators and laserbots are ubiquitous, and shit, if that fails, there's always the airlocks, but no - for some reason, people still want to get involved, even for subhuman trash like miners and hookers and mutants. They police the airlocks. And the DNA trackers in the disposal units are awfully nosy.

So, like some Viking throwback, I'm back to the pigs and the knives. I don't know why, but folks like me just can't seem to keep up with the times.