I followed a man and a prostitute to the bus stop this morning. They were running very heavily and very slowly, arguing with each other, no bus in sight. When I caught up to them she was seated in his lap on the bus stop bench and they were talking about the money they were going to get that day. When the bus came I stood by the back door while a short man next to me repeated, "You think you're pretty strong". I could hear him clearly but it was crowded and I was wearing headphones so I pretended I couldn't. I got off at the corner of Main and Hastings to change buses. As I was approaching the bus stop I looked up to find a grey haired man facing me in the middle of the sidewalk, smoking a crack pipe. Behind him, blocking the door to the bus, a man with cerebral palsy was laying prostrate in a big, black relining electric wheel chair, wearing only a diaper and a stained white t-shirt. His helper was smoking a cigarette and didn't mind that his client was in the way, so when the bus came we all squeezed past his head while he looked up at us.

On the way home I got off the bus at Main and Hastings. A man was slumped forward on the bus stop bench with a line of drool hanging off the end of his cigarette. I waited for my bus on the opposite corner while a man sat on the side walk, swaying back and forth with his head between his knees and dangling a big cross between his ankles. A woman came out of the adjacent building and started telling him that she finally dumped her boyfriend, but he didn't respond. When the bus came I stood beside a woman with what looked like third degree burns running across her head from ear to ear in a perfectly straight, three inch wide stripe. A big puff of hair rose off the front of her head and at the back it was pulled tight into a bun. She lay sideways in a clean floral print dress, resting her head on the back of the seat and sighing loudly the rest of the way home.