One of the great atrocities of my life is that I was once forced to take public transit. I rode, horror of horrors, on a (ick) bus. By myself. I mean, I'm lucky to even be alive. Because even if I wasn't brutally murdered, ten minutes on that expressway to hell was enough to make a girl seriously contemplate suicide. All of my deepest, darkest fears were instantly realized when a man with criminally baggy pants hanging far below his swatch of pubic hair swung his uni-dreadlock into my face. I still haven’t fully scrubbed myself clean. And I still remember the icky, dank feeling, like a thousand worms crawling up my flesh, of just standing there while swarms of old people hogged all the seats. I mean, why would they even bother leaving the house? In their peeling, wrinkled skin, they looked like they might crumple and/or disintegrate at any second. If I ever get that old, something has to be done. At the very least, I'll take pity on the outside world, and board myself up inside my house forever.
If I remember correctly- even though I have tried in vain with hypnosis and acupuncture and whatever else to wipe this black stain of a day forever from even the deepest abscesses of my mind- the bus took about four (longer than waiting room hell) hours, as opposed to, say, the four minutes that it should have taken. And when I did get a seat, the man next to me didn’t even stand up so that I could rest my shopping bags. Some people have all the nerve. Because of that near fatal disaster, our nanny from some unspellable country was let go the very next day, this time for good, as though secretly hoarding our rice hadn’t been bad enough. Living through that holocaust of the soul is something that I'll never forget.