Notebook : pages 29-30

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Another song-that-wasn't. Bus chatter as material: mass transit conversation as portraiture. You don't take the bus, man, the bus takes you. (Shades of Yakov Smirnoff in there.)

I ride the bus when I need to get somewhere. I live and work downtown, so the bus (and the MAX, and the streetcar) comes in to play for the out-of-the-routine stuff: band practices, shopping, visiting the family across town, dentist appointments, and so on. The feel of the crowd onboard varies a lot based on the bus line and the time of day—evening rush hour buses tend to be full and slouching and not too noisy; late night buses are emptier but often have a couple of chatty drunks up front; the 14 Hawthorne is mostly white folks, the 6 MLK up into North Portland mostly black.

So there's a lot of character and variety to what a bus ride is like, as far as background conversation goes. I had thought it would be cool to try to capture some of that in anecdotes and overhearings, but I didn't make much progress. The stuff scrawled here and on the top of the next page are quick transcriptions and transliterations of the words and noises that zipped pass in about a two minute period the day I wrote this on the bus.

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