The Greater Portion of Being Alive

That's what Bukowski said about waiting. And I'm not Bukowski, but tonight that seems pretty right on to me, and probably to the many good people who got caught in presidential traffic today.

There's something about waiting for a bus when you're really set against walking to your destination, especially when the app says your bus is due in three minutes. "Wow!" you think. "What great timing!" And then five minutes pass and you recheck the app and the timeline has moved back another four minutes, and you still think that's pretty reasonable. What's four minutes? You bust out your container of nuts and raisins because that's all you'll have time for before your ride arrives. But it isn't there yet.

You check the app. Another five minutes? Suddenly it ain't small potatoes anymore.

At this point you wonder if it's worth waiting. Because in the twelve minutes you've waited plus the five more in your near future, you could have walked there already. But you also realize that as soon as you get far enough away from the bus stop that you can't just turn back, the bus will pull up to the curb and pass you by. Ugh!

But how we'll wait for things-- we'll kill the time-- when we're too tired to realize or care we're getting a shitty deal. I mean, I know that bus is always late when I get there on time, and it's always early when I'm en route. I know the app is lying to me when it says three minutes, and yet I think, "This time will be different. This time it really will be three minutes." And it never is!

So as I walked home tonight, after I Biki biked home, after I stood up in the theatre for over eight hours, I still wasn't cursing POTUS for making all the buses late. I thought, "Well, at least I can walk over the freeway to get home." What I really should have been thinking about, though, is what I to write about today. And I did. I thought about time as a relative thing. Because if you told me I'd have to wait nearly twenty minutes for the bus to come, I might have just started walking home right then and there, cursing my good fortune. If you'd told me that even after I'd gotten home, the bus STILL hadn't come, I'd feel relief.

And for Joe Bob and Sally, time means very little until they want something. How they each move through time is very different, though both probably feel its passing as slow and arduous if not sometimes as something to ignore and endure. It seems like a ridiculous thing to juggle all these things, these factors that may never come up in the story but affect it nonetheless. I will likely spend very little time talking about time itself, but it's turning out to be one of the things I think about a lot. How would you experience time if you had an abundance of it. Like, really. What if you had lifetimes?

Anyway, I'm tired and sore and exhausted, but I'm pleased I walked home, and not just because I'd probably still be at the bus stop if I had waited. I imagined I worked off at least part of all those donut holes I shoved in my face on Thursday. What an oinker.