Urban Legends #1: 7.27.09--12 noon

This little "episode" of the blog is based off of The Floating City, a column Hawaii's independent newspaper, Honolulu Weekly. The column describes stray moments and chance encounters, where strangers are temporarily linked to experience a moment of absurdity. A summer of riding Hawaii public transportation (nothing good comes from riding TheBus), and living in D.C., urban strangeness is bound to happen. Besides, nothing happens in the suburbs.

Nothing.

Hopefully you'll find these stories entertaining, although like many of my ideas, this too will probably be unpopular and short lived. We'll see.

URBAN LEGENDS #1: 7.27.09--12 noon

Taking the E bus from Ala Moana to Ewa Beach. The bus takes its usual stop in Downtown Honolulu and opens its doors for its usual group of passengers. As the normal group of people trudge onto the bus, a woman sits decisively to the seat next to mine. She then started to engage in a one-sided conversation in a nonsensical story that I at first tried to follow, until I realized it made no sense. She pointed out local places TheBus passed by and weaved them into her narrative of epic nonsense themed with domestic abuse, prostitution, Roy Orbison songs, and Jesus hymns.

"She has a heart problem, like asthma or something."

As she spoke, her focus was undirected and scattered, and her body movements had a mind of their own as limbs flailed from where she was sitting, telling stories of mountains, guns, and obscenities. TheBus takes the on-ramp to the freeway, and she points out Royal School as it passes. I soon realized that she wasn't wearing a Bluetooth headset; I was in for an hour of crazy.

She had a navy sweater tied around her hips. A gray tanktop. A red Salvation Army grocercy bag laid on top of her ratted shorts. Years of picked scabs pattern her arms and legs. When she first paused, she turned her gaze to the right and stared at my hands that were nervously grasping my bag. Two minutes later, my fantasies of being invisible apparently became a reality, since she returned to her ramblings with renewed energy. One more time she paused, to fish out a bag of half finished sunflower seeds from her red bag. By this time, I lost track of her stories and zoned out to the new rhythm of her teeth cracking the shell of the sunflower seeds and watched her (from the corner of my eye) collect the shells in her left hand. The bus ride that lasted an eternity ended too abruptly; with a sudden stop in her rhythmic speak-crack-eat-speak routine, the woman threw the collected sunflower seeds in her hand onto the floor of the bus, and left.