Toss Me A Cigarette, I Think There's One in My Raincoat

April 16th:

There was a woman on the metro collecting money from people this morning. Each time someone handed her a token amount, a folded dollar bill, a clasp of quarters, she held it high in her hands and kissed it theatrically.

I am taking an afternoon bus to UCLA. Highland/Sunset, Bus #2 is written big across my palm. A man who was at the bus stop before me chain-smoked cigarette after cigarette. I waited 25 minutes watching the passers-by by foot, by bike by car. There was a white mercedes full of old people and a nervous collegiate-looking guy in a polo shirt. There was a couple who beamed at the bus stop standers. There was a bearded man on a bicycle with a long thick braid. There was a man across the street who had dug through the trash cans on every corner of the intersection and amassed a meal. He stood eating it by a trashcan. He was golden and his skin was dirty. He had a big, worn book with the covers missing, and beamed at me cynically as he walked past. A jocular buddy approached him and punched him on the shoulder while he was eating.

The smoking man got on the bus the same time as I did, rode 2 blocks, then walked off. I could see him heave as he coughed in the heat, the sun shining on his pinkish bald spot.

The man across from me on the bus looks like a big buddha. He's cradling a large, Zen-green flowerpot with a few sleepy red flowrs in it.

The inside of the bus is much, much cleaner than the city outside it. But the view changes as we move further West down Sunset, streetlights begin to recede, clean-clipped hedges spring up. Despite the divide between the grit and grass here, or maybe partly because of it, I'm beginning to love this city. And it's at these times, on the bus or the metro, that I realize it most. I don't think you can truly love a city until you have freedom, or until you have your freedom in it. And it's here, on the gossamery line between points A and B, traveling through uncounted time that doesn't exist, that I feel most free.