Gasoline here in Michigan is about ready to break through the $4.00 per gallon level. To fill my Hyundai Santa Fe would start to impact my budget and begin forcing me to decide whether I want to buy food or not. I am not like any of the other people who live here who are natives, Michiganders would pay for the “pleasure” of driving their vehicles even if gas was at $10 a gallon. My New York sensibilities have already kicked in. Nobody in this state has “carpool” in their vocabulary so I’ve elected to not even bring up the concept to them and instead just take the bus.
And so I have, and this week is the model for how the rest of my weeks will be structured. On Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays I get up at 6:15, out the door by 6:45, to catch the East Main Bus, all in all I would estimate that it’s one mile per trip, so effectively two miles walked per day. I get to work at 7:20, and then I’m pretty much stuck at work the whole day long. I have to leave by 4:45 to catch the return bus, and if I miss that, I have to wait until 5:45.
Wednesdays are my favorite days now. It’s on Wednesday that I take my car to work. Wednesday is Comics Lunch Day. I pick up Scott, we go to the comic book store and get our weekly comic books and then we find someplace cheap to have lunch. I then get back to work, and can take a more comfortable and leisurely path home whenever I like.
But for the most part I don’t regard driving a vehicle as a pleasure. It’s a horror, a terror, a harrowing trip through a nightmare hellscape populated by people who shouldn’t be allowed to use a vehicle at all. All manner of human trash is on the roads these days, morons, pinheads, dopes, dorks, losers, meth-heads, pot-heads, and the rest… “If god wanted for them to drive, he would have given them XXXXX” What is the XXXXX? It all depends on which racial, gender, or national gripe you’re fond of. And they are out there. In this state it’s a uniquely unpleasant experience, driving with these “people”. Nobody in Michigan has a single clue what a directional signal is for, they simply could not be bothered and the police can’t be bothered with enforcing any laws beyond running their speed-traps. The best way to jail a Michigander is to put them in their vehicle and arrange for 4 cars to approach a 4-stop intersection all at the same time. They would starve to death before any of them moved. I’ve never witnessed such overwhelming mind-lock in my life. They’d likely start gnawing on their tastefully appointed leather seats, whine, wet on the carpet and dry wash their hands in frustration. Eventually you’d see 4 bone-white skeletons sitting behind the wheel, the cars rusted solid and the gas tanks empty. As a native New Yorker it’s my right and pleasure to plow through all these mind-locked yoyos, even if it isn’t my turn. They won’t move, so screw ’em, I will.
And that’s why I don’t drive. It just makes me angry. It makes me angry and well, terrified for my life. So if something is dangerous, terrifying, *and* expensive then giving it up is comically obvious.
I have to admit that taking the bus is like it is in any nowhere midwest town. There are train tracks that divide this place and it colors the entire experience. You have sides of the track, and you can plug any harsh stereotypical reality into that division. Good, Bad; Rich, Poor; White, Black; Safe, Dangerous. Every city has something like this, a good place and a bad place, but it’s where the railroad exists that you see “The Wrong Side Of The Tracks” is so starkly apparent. Whats the most comedic of all is how lame and insignificant the railroad has been allowed to droop. It used to be the preferred way to get from one city to another, but now you have to pay top-dollar to sit in a seat soaked with urine and arrive, if your lucky, on the same calendar day you left even if you only need to go 150 miles away. But that’s another rant, the train tracks color the people and the people color the bus system. Who takes the bus? The poor, the workers, the minimum wage victims, and thanks to WMU’s deal with the bus system, students and employees, Hiya! You wouldn’t see any of the high and mighty, the good and great of this town even get on a bus. I don’t even think they perceive buses. It’s pretty clear that they don’t perceive people like me, the middle-class, the “little people”. That’s actually quite a pleasant thing and lucky for us “little people” because we don’t have to be bothered by their obnoxious overhousing problems, their sexual perversions and their raging alcoholism. They get in their obnoxiously priced gas-guzzling vehicles and disappear into their gated-communities-without-gates (sometimes they have gates!) and leave the rest of us in peace to imagine a world where they don’t exist. Because they wouldn’t be caught dead with the rabble, it’s as easy as falling off a log.
So really my most convenient and pleasant day is fundamentally bound up with comic books. In a way Diamond Publishing determines my weekly calendar, even if it is only very subtly.
I don’t expect to run into anyone I recognize using the bus system here. They are all monomaniacally obsessed with their vehicles and I seriously doubt anything will ever dissuade that. Perhaps someday when all the oil is up out of the ground and we’ve burned it all, and there isn’t any way to make these boxes of metal move, then people will be up against the wall. That will be a very interesting day, indeed.