FriendBurst Blog

We all gawked at the unusual and impressive machine that was parked at the Lynnwood Transit Center. Look at it! It was like a little piece of London, England had come to the Northwest and was waiting for us to use it. I hadn’t seen a vehicle like this since I lived in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1986. I’m fairly sure few if any of my fellow public transportation consumers had ever seen such a thing except in pictures.

Now, if only they had painted it bright red, it really would have felt like we were in jolly old England.

I noted to some of my fellow travelers that I was almost tempted to get on that bus and just go wherever it was going just to have the experience of riding on a two-story bus. Some concurred. We were all kind of giddy that such a beast could be a part of our local bus system.

Naturally, such an animal (probably the only one in the Community Transit Fleet) is a commuter bus; I noted it was on the main Seattle route, going from the north end of the metro area into the heart of the city. The bus riders I was sharing my local route with found this very unfair.

“They should but that bus on the Edmonds Community College route! That’s where they need it!” the lady complained, “Community Transit so favors their ‘commuter’ passengers!” she continued to bitch. C’mon, lady. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve gotten on a local route to find that I was the ONLY ONE on the bus. That’s sort of a weird feeling.

“Home, James!” I’ve told the drivers multiple times when that happens.

Here it is on a Friday. I’ve only spent an hour or two on the internet all day, and not once have I run into any reference to Rebecca Black and her song, “Friday.” Yeah, Becky, your 15 minutes are up! Go sit in the back of Internet Meme bus… Watch out for the guy dressed as a lumberjack with the ax.

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I went and did something today that I haven’t done in a year. I went and played basketball at the Ballard Boys & Girls Club. There’s a regular group of guys who play there twice a week, and before the big change in my life a year ago this month, I was a regular there. Ah, I could write a whole blog about why pickup basketball is the greatest thing in exercise. I’ve never been all that fond of getting on some machine and working out; running without actually going somewhere is the very definition of pointless. Basketball, on the other hand, gives one’s workout an actual purpose, a sense of comradery with your teammates and an instant audience when a minor athletic feat leads to “victory”. That happened today.

In the final game of 90 minutes of running up and down the court, the score was 9-10 (we were losing). We had the ball and a shot went up, I crashed the boards and came away with a very hard-won offensive rebound, passed it to an open teammate, who put it in for an easy lay up. Next time down the court, we won the game 11-10. Someone came up to me afterwards and complimented me on the my rebound and assist, saying that was the “turning point” of the game.

Now, I sit here writing, a dull, slightly painful weary throbbing in my legs. Not only having that satisfied ache of a good, hard bit of exercise, but knowing that today, I was “winning”.

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Poetry. Another thing I haven’t done in a long time. Back in my early 20’s, I used to write a lot of it. I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.

Lest you forget, my new apartment is really small. My personal library is in the kitchen, of all places. Given the lack of cupboard space, the bookshelves also double as pantry space. I took this picture today because it seemed, for lack of a better term, poetic.

I call it:

Paper backs, poker chips, potatoes and paper clips.

I love the alliterative, rhyming and contrasting nature of those words.

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Lastly, I will end this theme of things I haven’s done in a long time with a song that was one of my favorites years back when I was a guitar player. I used to play this song all the time, but had not played it once on the ukulele until last night per an inspiration from a certain primate many of us know.