Living as I do less than three miles from my work site, I do not commute by car; I take the bus. This entails a quarter-mile walk from my home to the bus stop, payment of a one-dollar fare to the Capital District Transportation Authority, and sitting or standing during a twenty-minute ride. During my walks to the corner, I often recite the reasons why I take the bus instead of driving my own car. It saves somewhere around five hundred dollars a month; my wife needs the car for her job; I believe in public transportation; parking in downtown Albany is atrocious; I like the time to think and read. Good reasons, I think to myself. You’re doing a good thing, I tell myself. None of those rationalizations hold any water on mornings with sub-zero wind chill, or when the passengers on the bus seem to have lost the user manuals for their bars of soap. With all its inherent benefits and flaws, the bus, at least for now, is the reality of my commute.
It occurred to me that I should document the human behavior that I see on the bus, mostly because it's bad. I thought I would set up an anonymous blog, and report what I see and hear along the trail of travail every day. Young men in suits taking seats while women, young and old, stand in discomfort. Boastful interns boarding the bus outside the State Capitol, complaining about the minutia of their sinecures. The bitter anger of a career bus driver manifesting itself any number of ways. Listening to the conversational confessions made by parents about their children, boyfriends about girlfriends, and about anything else you can imagine. Those excruciating moments when you listen to someone detail things you know to be untrue, and yet you are powerless to correct the oral record. People, stuffed shoulder-to-shoulder and ear-to-ear inside a moving box-car, cruising over the pitted roads and cavernous potholes of Albany's streets. Someone, I thought, should be writing all of this down. Putting it into the public record. Holding these bastards accountable for their petty words, and selfish actions. A blog, I thought. A blog of all the details of this crappy, dull ride. That will show them. I even came up with a thesis statement, and posted it to a blog entitled "the bus sees all." It was as follows:
"What you do is who you are. Your actions and your words reveal you. Do you generate good energy or bad energy? How do you act under pressure? Who are you when time is short, comfort is not assured and you are not at your best? When there is no reason to be rude, do you chose to be rude? When there is no reason to be kind, are you still kind? Do you act with benign neglect towards your environment, with true benevolence and caring towards those around you, or do you act in self-interest, unaware of your crass ugliness? Watch the people around you on your way to and from whatever you do on this planet. The people with whom you share your commute are screaming to you. The person who just got onto the bus, who is sitting next to you, who is waiting with you on the corner, whose car just pulled up next to you at the stoplight, and those who are driving the cars around you. They are telling you who they are and asking you who you are. You are all silently screaming the soundtrack and dialogue that constitutes your narrative, your life, your soul, your time on this rock. You are being watched. Nothing escapes notice."
I anticipated collecting tales of near-horror the next morning and running home to spray them into the blog-of-record, the blog-of-account. I planned to drop slips of paper on the bus to spread the blog’s web address, and insert slips into choice books at the library. The word, I resolved, would be spread. Sleep came easy that night.
The next morning, I rode an empty bus to work. The ride was quick, and I was even on time for work. There were no other passengers on the bus. Just a fluke, I thought. The ride home is always full of jokers and fools. I prepared to walk off of the bus that evening with tales of over-loud conversations about trite topics, the hubris of youth, and the rudeness of our city’s denizens. Shows what I know.
That night I boarded the bus, walked to the back, and found a good place to stand. From that vantage I could watch the bus fill, and catch any passenger fulfilling my dark expectations. My eyes scanned up and back; side to side. They lighted on each face briefly, searching for the slightest sneer. I listened for all things inconsiderate as if my next meal depended on it. It's a good thing it did not. As passengers piled on to the bus, I witnessed an act of everyday kindness by a young man who couldn't have been old enough to buy beer. He was seated while reading a paperback book. He lifted his head, saw that the aisle was full of people, and stood up. Smiling, he offered his seat to a middle-aged woman, and walked to the rear of the bus, right next to me. I hid my surveillance well, and continued to study him up-close. A fresh, unwrinkled face confirmed his youth, and his brown topsider-style shoes looked like something a mother would select for her sweet boy. He didn’t fidget, didn’t slouch, and didn’t take any of the seats that emptied along the way. He just stood, and waited for his stop. He even spoke for a moment on his mobile phone in a very soft tone. I took it as a sign, a rebuke of my negative attitude. Despite all the strange and rude things I had witnessed on busses, here was truly desirable human nature. An example of the benevolence that I would prefer to see in others. Kindness, self-awareness, the ability to give. At the very least, we should be able to exist in benign neglect of our fellow strangers. I very much wanted to see something bad; something lurid or discourteous. There was nothing vulgar to hear and nothing boorish to observe.
That was all I needed to see, I decided; the blog would be no more. With nothing malicious to convey, I chose not to invent tales of loutish activities, or to conjure up moments from the past. I shelved the whole idea. This blog entry is all that remains.
© 2005 by justin michael cresswell
