he greeted me with a smile, nodded at my bus pass, hit the gas and tore down wilshire like he had been there before.

“i love bukowski,” the young woman with the tounge piercing revealed to me. i was sitting in the very back row of seats in the middle. she was sitting on the drivers side next to the window. she was spying on me.

i smiled back.

“do you like any female authors?” she asked.

i continued smiling and shook my head no thinking that shed leave me alone.

i thought about how my friend had said that all the great female authors were either crazy or crazy, and it’s not amazing when crazy people write great books

and i was going to present this thesis to my fellow commuter when i saw that the bus driver had slid his way through the wilshire corridor so quickly and assuredly that we had reached my destination in record time and i had only read one poem from “what matters most is how well you walk through the fire,” and i had written only a few lines in my diary.

i got off the bus and began walking and the sun was nice and the air was clean and a homeless man dug through a public wastecan, picked up a styrofoam to-go box, inspected its contents and rejected it completely.

and at the half hour the watch left behind last night from clipper girl’s college roommate chimed on my wrist.