BUSSTOP

Wherever I go, whether it is driving around doing errands or walking down the street or sitting at an airport, there is a part of my periphery that is gathering impressions. It can be the way the light is surrounding a tree, a young boy sitting in a red car playing with his seat belt, how all new babies' cries are unique in tone but the same in what they ask for...these little microbursts of some kind of reality, saved. Sometimes, I take something right away and make something from it here. Sometimes I pull something out of the dusty memory banks to help me best describe something else I want to convey. But most things I suspect are taken in and soon lost, or I lose the ability to access them purposefully.

Every so often, something I have randomly seen sticks with me and persists and nags at me until I stop and think about it some more. This morning I had to take the two little ones to school. It was, as usual, chilly and wet, with the sun just coming up. After I dropped them off, I stopped off at the OOGCP for a latte, tired and probably with that Bedraggled Mom look, inexplicably modified by my MTV t-shirt. I didn't stay; the coffee was not to be sipped, it was to be downed for function. As I got back in the car and headed up the hill towards home in a long line of commuters, I glanced to my right. There was a lone man at the bus stop, standing and staring far into the distance. It was hard to tell how old he was -- maybe early to mid-30s -- with longish messy brown hair, something of a beard, tall,handsome. His clothes were baggy and haphazard, looking like perhaps they had not been washed in awhile,maybe put on day after day from where he put them on the floor, like it didn't matter.

It was the look on his face that struck me, and stuck with me all of today. It wasn't until I was listening to the radio later on, listened to the words of this song, and something went, oh man, that is it. That's what is going on with the man at the bus stop, staring past the cars, past the fire station, past the houses, past the line of fir trees, past the clouds into nothing. Call me crazy, and you can if you want, but my gut tells me in that one or two seconds I saw him as I drove past, I felt it. No, this isn't Psychic Friends Hotline and I am no Miss Cleo. But when you train yourself to see and feel every day, all day, sometimes you hook into someone else's world, even for one second. Go figure.

Radiohead -- "Planet Telex"

You can force it but it will not come
You can taste it but it will not form
You can crush it but it's always here
You can crush it but it's always near
Chasing you home saying
Everything is broken
Everyone is broken

You can force it but it will stay stung
You can crush it as dry as a bone
You can walk it home straight from school
You can kiss it, you can break all the rules
All the rules...
Everything is broken
Everyone is broken

Everyone is, everyone is broken
Everyone is, everything is broken

Why can't you forget?
Why can't you forget?
Why can't you forget?