BR: Cigarettes & a Slim Jim

I know it has been a while since I gave a bus report. Today however I'd like to give more of a payphone report.

I remember when payphones were fun. My best friend Paul and I used to run around and collect the phone numbers so we could call them and talk to random people. They also served to satisfy our teenage phone fixations when not at home. Then came the mobile phone.

Basically today if you don't have a mobile phone you're either out of work and/or homeless. It used to be that you were hot shit if you had a "car phone" but now practically everyone has one. It was the calling card of the priveleged. So what has become the unlikely victim of this? The payphone.

There are two payphones at the park and ride where I catch the bus in the morning. Sometimes I see someone slouched over whispering into the mouthpiece. I can only imagine the conversation.

Today I glanced over at the phone and noticed the wrappings from an Albertson's brand package of string cheese and a partially eaten Slim Jim. Truly brain food. There was also an empty carton of some off-brand of cigarettes with a non-descript logo of some kind on it.

These items tell the story of bad hair, trailer courts, teenage pregnancies and phone calls made to parole officers. Even the drug dealers don't use payphones anymore. They are truly the bastion of low end living.

But sometimes you have to stop intellectualizing, and get back on the bus.

Today it's mostly regulars: 80's Jacket Guy (you know, high-waist cinched cut herringbone wool blend with oversized buttons and double pointed lapels), shorts guy, and crispy-haired blonde girl. No, not Brenda... But another that I'd like you to get to know today. Let's call her Katrina. Katrina gets off the bus in front of the Gene Juarez school of beauty and though I've never seen her go in I imagine that's her ultimate destination.

Katrina has long waist length bottle-blonde hair: crispy on top, stringy on the bottom. Kind of like baked spaghetti. If she indeed does attend Gene Juarez beauty school then she must have been absent the day they taught creme rinse.

She also enjoys the rouging brush, though not before she prepares her canvas with fingers coated in drugstore brand base.

We've moved past our last pickup spot and the bus is now full - with windows moistening from the exhale of so many bus patrons. In many ways a bus is like a payphone: public, carriers of disease. But again, you have to stop intellectualizing.