#4 Dee Why to Downtown Bus Trips – A Diary of Stuff that Popped into My Head One Week.

Returning – Wednesday, 4.56p.m., 7 December 2011

Chatty, steamy, humid. Foggy windows and plenty of facial expressions – query, smile, relief. The rain is pretty steady as we head over Sydney Harbour Bridge.

The guy sitting with his arms folded across his chest, next to me, has coffee breath and somehow it’s alerted me to the fact I’m hungry.

Two elderly ladies, each with wavy, grey hair, are amongst the chattiest, hardly turning away from each other, words dripping down the front of them and piling up on their laps. The one closest to me looks like she could be Wallace’s (from Wallace and Gromit) mother – she resembles Wallace. Wallace and Gromit had an episode called “The Wrong Trousers”. Well, I think this lady is starring in her own episode called “The Wrong Shoes”, because her feet are hanging out of her shoes right now. They’re bulging over the sides like lumpy custard that boiled over the rim of a too-small pot.

The tall guy sitting directly opposite me has a bald head shaped like a turtle shell, it’s unusually broad and looks very hard. Even his mouth forms the shape of a turtle’s. He seems completely detached from his surroundings within this rain smothered bus. He’s deep in thought. I reckon if I flopped myself out he wouldn’t even notice.

I’m finding it difficult to write while I’m hungry. People do eat turtles. Flop myself out or eat the turtle? Think I’ll eat the turtle.

Almost there.

I’m hungry.

Thursday is tomorrow. Almost the weekend. My wife, Erin, and I plan to try a local Japanese restaurant where we’ve never eaten at before.

Food. I’m hungry.

We’re new to the Dee Why area. So, in fact, there are lots of restaurants for us to try. To eat at.

I’m hungry.

It’s still raining and I’m still hungry. It continues to rain and I continue to feel hunger.

Hungary is a European country. I’ve been there, it was 1990. I remember eating some wonderful food in Budapest with a Canadian I’d met by chance. Mark was his name. And it still is. Some things never change. We were hungry in Hungary and we ate.

I’m hungry.

This journal I’m writing in is hungry for my thoughts, my perceptions and my words. I feed it.

I’m hungry and I need feeding, too.

Time to finish writing. We approach the bus stop – or it approaches us, depends how you look at it.

I am hungry. I will eat.