Waiting for the lawerence bus a nice beef cakey dude sparked a convo with me. He assumed I was in highschool and was pleasantly surprised when I wasn’t. He asked me why I was working and why my boyfriend didn’t pay my rent. I told him my theoretical boyfriend was a piece of shit and I didn’t want to live with him. He liked that I called my theoretical boyfriend a piece of shit. He asked me if I was a metal head and I retorted that if I chose a heavier genre of rock I’d choose punk. He asked me if I usually dated boys with huge mohawks, skinny jeans and qoute, “shirts like, how do you call them, bras”. It turns out he was from serbia and lived and worked in a bunch of places in europe and that he’d only been in the states for about 3 months. Although he came on strong he was a nice foreign man. I decided to hop on the western bus southbound because lawerence was taking forever and I can walk home from irving park. I wished him luck in waiting for the bus and he made some cute joke about moral support in good but poorly articulated broken english. He then proceeded to follow me across the street and asked me if he could reopen the coffee shop he ran and make me some drinks and talk. I politely declined partially out of fear of being raped in an abandoned cafe but mostly because my back hurts and I want to lay in bed and eat and watch netflix. I probably should have agreed because I’ve never experienced someone with such large muscles and personified testosterone so well and I could use something well hung and possibly uncircumsized.

Someone I know was stabbed to death over the weekend. I hardly knew this person, he was a friend of a lot of my close friends. My interactions with him while he was alive were short and sour. I thought he was a dick. When I found out about his death I felt horrible, in a selfish way. I felt bad that his death had no affect on me. I felt bad that I only knew him as this insufferable asshole that I occasionally saw at parties. I felt even worse that my memories of him were so bad that I couldn’t properly mourn his death. I don’t even really have the right to mourn his death but it feels awful to only have bad memories about someone who died in such a gruesome and unjust way. I feel even worse for my friends who knew him for a long time and saw the good in him that I am sure existed and that I was never able to see. I mostly just feel guilty for disliking him while he was alive because really no one deserves to loose their life that early and in the way he did. Anyways I’m just thinking about this because I’m on the bus and I passed the intersection where he was stabbed and a police photographer was there snapping pictures.

Whenever I see straight couples on the bus, and the man holds the woman’s bus card I think its both cute and sad. Cute in the chivalrous sense, I hold it in the same regards as opening doors for someone. Sad in the sense that it just seems so stifling and withholding. I would love for someone to put my bus card in the machine for me but I would never want them to hold on to it. Maybe this has to do with my weird independence/control issues but the thought of someone else having control of my bus card makes me feel like I’m suffocating. There is just such a weird dominance power struggle aspect in such a little gesture.

I love how all the old korean ladies in albany park know each other (or at least act as if they do). Same feeling goes out to the eastern-euro grandmas in west logan square and all the way along Milwaukee.

Up the punx, full volume.

I luckily got on the western bus before lane got out of class. This dude was staring at me for the duration of his trip because he couldn’t figure out whether I was wearing weird pants or my legs were fucked up. I just passed monroe and the military highschool that is over here just got out of class. Now my bus is filled with highschool kids and crazies. I hate when kids sit with their back packs on, it just makes it uncomfortable to sit next to them. There are two bag ladies on my bus. One is a hypochondriac with a walker that has a shitload of bags tied on it. The other is the kind of bag lady that talks to everyone but is rude to people that aren’t black and gets confrontational and feels entitled. There are only two white people on my bus. Its just really interesting to see how much shit changes on western between addison and 40th. It goes from roscoe village to the end of logan square to bucktown to east humboldt park then ukranian village then, I’m not even sure what this part of town is called and then the outskirts of pilsen and then I get off in brighton park. I love this city. A lot. And I’m glad I get to experience all these different sections of chicago in one bus ride.