Listening to the bluegrass band
Takes the chill from the air
Until they play the last song.
I'll do my time
Keeping you off my mind
But there's moments that I find
I'm not feeling too strong.

Bruce Hornsby & The Range, "Mandolin Rain"
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The ride of the morning bus is a quiet half-an-hour ride in which I can quietly sip my morning beverage-of-choice and stare out the window, and maybe read a few pages of whatever book I'm reading (today, it's One Hundred Years of Solitude, which has the storytelling power of Saul Bellow, the verbal beauty of Pablo Neruda, and the stark ambition of The Old Testament). I've spent so long being in the driver's seat that I've never noticed the way the 101 looks when you cross it on an overpass. In the Conejo Valley's morning fog, you see the tinsel of headlights approaching, the streaming of reds departing, and the verdant green bounding the freeway. You never see the ambers of a lane change, though. This is still reality on the other side of my bus window.

Robert, the diabetic womanizing mound of sulfur (my bunkie was, apparently, the devil himself) left last night. He was an interesting character, even if you look beyond the damage he'd done to my olfactory nerves. While he seemed immature in both his handling of interpersonal responsibility (though who is really innocent of that?) and in his view of the world beyond his 'hood, he honestly seemed open to my blunt method of stating fact, or my ability express a fully informed opinion. It's sad to think that he never had such a succinct courier of thought prior to me, and on the one hand, I took every opportunity to impart some of my own beliefs, but at the same time, I merely tried to present to him a way of thinking, or a way of forming argumentative thought. For instance, having no in-depth knowledge of the goings-on in Iraq, I told him that Yes, we won the war, but there's still a lot going on, and I related it to him as such: if some other country that didn't like Bush all of a sudden decided to invade America, what would you do if tanks and soldiers from that country all of a sudden ended up in your 'hood? You might no like Bush, but you certainly hate tanks and soldiers in your street. What would you do? His response: me and my homies would get down with those motherfuckers. In a less slangly parlance: we would fight them off. So that's how I explained the violence in a country that involved a war we already "won"; the US is dealing with [fact] the Iraqi version of Mexican street gangs in Ventura County[/fact] and [opinion]nothing short of civil war will fix that situation[/opinion].

On the whole, I'm glad to see him go, because in spite of his eager reception to my ideals or my way of thinking, it did tax me to have to spoon-feed him, or to have to hold his hand as he makes mental leaps and bounds. One time, I referred to a menage-a-trois, opting against the more appropriate French term, as a threesome. He completely didn't understand it, so I had to describe it, to which he said, "Oh, you mean a three-way; it's called a three-way." After enough exasperation of having to express every permutation (and manually dismiss all of the possibilities that wouldn't make sense in whatever context), of which oh-you-mean-a-three-way is an example, I eventually resigned myself to sitting on my bunk and letting him struggle. Possession of power is separate from the exertion of power, and besides, he's a free man now; free to make mistakes on his own, and in some off chance, learn from them, but free nonetheless. No amount of cognitive reasoning is going to prevent me from escaping these walls, though it'll be through sheer force of will that keeps those walls from collapsing.