An average looking man was talking to himself when I got on the bus today. He was half yelling, "I wouldn't have left it in there," as I sat down, and then he trailed off. A block or two later he said the same thing, and then later again he added, "Because I was afraid something like that was going to happen." As I was getting off he said, "The Devil, he looked just like him. I don't know what it was about him..." It was sunny and hot and the corner of Main and Hastings was in pandemonium.

On the way home the intersection was clogged with fire trucks, police wagons and ambulances. A man rode by on a bicycle wearing another bicycle around his neck. Someone walked out into traffic to beg for change with a paper Starbucks cup. When the first car he came to refused him he made off crying in a high pitched squeal like a very small child. A man picking up cigarette butts on the other side of the street stepped around him like he didn't even notice. Then a man with no legs below the top of the knees pushed himself past in a battered wheel chair, singing to himself. On the bus I sat across from a muscle man who loudly ordered around his girlfriend while she stood near by holding bags of groceries. When she got a seat next to me he interrogated her across the aisle about the day she'd had registering for a recovery program like he knew all the answers. Then a man got on with a large, broad nose oozing puss and blood like it had been boiled and pressed through a metal sieve up to the hilt of his nostrils and no further. Beside the muscle bound man, there was an enormous homeless person hugging a bundle of blankets who had been yelling periodically that the bus ride was taking too long. When the man with the melting nose passed down the aisle between us he yelled, "JESUS! FUCK!" At the next stop a man with one leg was waiting. When the man with the blankets heard the beeping of the wheelchair ramp unfolding he yelled again, "Oh CHRRRIIIST! FUCK!"