Thursday was a great day for eavesdropping on the bus. You didn’t even have to get anywhere near the eaves to drop down from them. People with their conversations approached you, built eaves at an easily mountable height and then proceeded to crouch beneath them and speak loudly.
On my ride to work I sat in front of a guy talking on his cell phone. I tuned in when he mentioned Union Gospel Mission, and how these programs take time to work and if he’d stop taking the drugs now he’d go into withdrawal so he needed the drugs by the end of the day. “I don’t think you understand!” he kind of shouted into his phone, before signing off with a “Go fuck yourself.” Then he calls someone else and explains loudly to her that he’d just talked to his doctor and the doctor won’t prescribe enough pain pills for him because of his insurance, and he’s explaining about when his year of meds began and when it ends and why he needs the drugs now and how he was in detox and didn’t ask anyone to pay for that. Then he gets huffier and says “You know, on December 27th I was so sick of dealing with insurance and the WCB (Workers Compensation Board) and the pain and everything I took thirty pills and tried to die! So now the doctor won’t prescribe more than a week’s worth at a time and you won’t pay for it…” This was when he got off the bus.
And then on my way home from work a guy got on the bus and was having a good ol’ chat with the bus driver, in a voice that carried to the back. As he wove his way back there some person, emboldened by this guy’s loudness I guess, asked if loud guy knew the score of the hockey game. Loud guy did and this started the entire back half of the bus in on a furball of a conversation about playoff hockey and the Habs and Ovechkin and 1993. It was like the bus had turned into a sports bar with all these strangers just going on about their common interests. Sparked by a loud guy talking to a bus driver.
