There is a certain happiness sighted when your bus comes along. It is of course a small specialized form of happiness and will never be a great thing.

-Richard Brautigan, The Old Bus

Friday, June 1, 2007

Grateful June bugs and serpent masters

Another month, another pass. And now another RT blogger?

Beancounter asks the question everyone is wondering about:

We have a Sacramento light rail operator who blogs about his job on RT Driver ... and we have a light rail commuter at RT Rider.

But will they ever meet?

And if they do, will it create some sort of temporal rift in the blog space/time continuum?

I'm having difficulty getting a grip on the whole concept. I'm still stuck with the vision of that serpent slithering into the 65th Street station, clanging its bell and flashing its beady yellow eyes, smugly calling attention to itself.

Meet the Svengali controlling the serpent?

Not in the dark.

Not even in the cool morning light. The No. 82 bus pulled into Sacramento State at 8:47 a.m., followed closely by a No. 30 bus. I left the 82 and its rendezvous with the serpent and walked to the 30 bus. I was greeted by a lady driver as I boarded.

Soon we were traveling down J Street through East Sacramento. As the bus approached each stop, the driver identified the intersection. Stop after stop this continued. No one wanted to get off. No one was waiting to get on. A hint of exasperation began to tinge the driver's announcements. Her passengers began to feel guilty. Then the driver finally found a passenger waiting in front of Mercy General Hospital. After that everyone relaxed. The bus company thoughtfully replaced the driver at 29th and L Streets.

I left the bus at 22nd Street and walked to work. At a house near 22nd and O streets, someone has painted a large brick and set it up as a billboard atop the wall around a flowerbed. The brick is the size of a large, rectangular stepping stone. It has been painted bright pink. In black paint, it says, "Be Grateful." The Be Grateful brick billboard is liberally coated with gold or silver glitter. It is hard to tell the color in the sparkling morning light.

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