The Bus Driver

It was quite late, that's all he kept thinking on his first day. The training had been monotonous, rigid, and his employees uninspired, lazy, the only risque thoughts of various sexual positions enough to keep them awake. The minutes of the last months were spent simply with his eyes moving back and forth, his head bouncing up and down, and the snores of the homeless taking a free ride interrupting his reflections on the new found life of a Bus Driver.

With fog penetrating the window panes of the flat faced tan colored bus, his wheels screeched while moving fast off the lines with a sudden green light. The area was quiet, the ocean simply around the corner, and down the hills to the golden ages of time. The waves muffled the rich pedigree of the past. Once filled with mansion tops, expensive baths, theme parks, it was now replaced with rather over priced restraunts and a once inspiring park left now to decay whose statues were random persons praised only for their antiquity.

It had only been a 100 years that it existed, maybe a bit more.

He had watched TV programs while unemployed that characterized true artistic wonders, thousands of years old, showing the thoughts and feelings of a civilization long lost to war, famine, revolutions.

"Fucking a hundred years old," he muttered under his breath. "Man, we don't know nothin'."

Cascades of shadows filtered onto his brow as he pulled along the same park now only a 100 years old. When the bus finally came to a halt, he sat back.

Sometimes he would stare off into space for minutes before awakening to either a cab honking, or a bum banging on the door for spare change, or the next shift knocking after catching him asleep while working. He knew the city needed him, they couldn't find anyone to take these shitty hours, and let alone work for a city with such poor benefits and meager wages.

It was always interesting what he saw on the bus rides through the city. The drinkers with their paper bags, the tweekers with their Jack-O-Lantern smiles, or the club kids sucking down water bottles after grinding their teeth, or the little old asian ladies who would only stare at him with a blank stare but smile as they stepped down in a shuffling fashion. These characters, heroes, villians made his days less tedious. He wished he had a notebook to write about the most horrible singer who would sing , "Take me out to the Ballgame," at 6 in morning to woo half asleep damsels in distress. He wore the old Lakers Champions cap with glasses he must have found outside an optometrist's office.