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

Going – Friday, 7.04a.m., 9 December 2011

Shiny sun. The sun shines at me and the bus’s radio is on – the bus driver is going very fast. A rogue driver we have. That’s okay, we shouldn’t be late then. The song playing is Real Life’s Send Me an Angel from the early eighties – is this bus driver on a suicide mission? If so, with him he’ll take down an almost full load of commuters, including me – but my weekend hasn’t even started yet.

He’s turned the volume down, I think he’s gone off his suicidal boil. My weekend is preserved.

They always have to get out in front, don’t they? Our blue bus rolled up to the red lights. Three motorbikes with madmen squeezed past the halted blue and the surrounding sedans to stop out in front of everyone else. They always have to be ahead. Do they realise they’re only racing up before everyone else to be placed behind whatever lays ahead? So, really they’re always the first to be last.

Stainless steel luggage rack enclosure, moulded rubber wraps the window panes, hard plastics all shapes, painted metal components, concave shimmering rear-view mirrors, sheets of rigid glass and multi-coloured carpet padded seats. You need a lot of materials to construct a bus.

Throw in a tinny sounding radio and a rogue bus driver and you’ve got a killing machine. Add some commuters, a couple of leading actors, a director, a flimsy script and a wad of money and you have a movie.

I hope over the weekend someone sweeps and mops this bus floor – it’ll make me feel so much better. Get rid of the black scuff marks, dried, caked up brown mud deposits, random pieces of what look like desiccated grass pieces and all the boot prints. Let’s begin next week fresh and clean. Whadda you think?