9 minutes

Well I've shortened my trip from work to my stop to nine minutes. So I get to the stop last night and I'm there almost 20 minutes early and I'm not too fond of sitting around waiting for the bus for that long so I decide to ride off to the next stop near a Walgreens where I stop in for a milk and a Hostess Twinkie. Mmm! Good. What an odd craving. I was catching the last bus of the night so I was at a risk of not having a slot on the rack for my bike, but I figure before long, I might not even need to ride it anymore as my stamina increases and I rediscover my long-dormant cycling abilities. Then I remind myself of the fact that my co-worker saw an accident where a Corvette had smashed into a cyclist Wednesday morning doing about 30mph and seeing a compound fracture and a sea of blood gushing from the wound and I realize that riding the bus for a large portion of the trip may not be such a bad thing after all. As it is, the 1 mile ride in to work has me cringing when I hear someone pushing 50 miles per hour on that winding road and I tense up and await the impact as I ride past the 3 day old stationary possum whose pleasant stench radiates further out from the epicenter each day I speed past. Every day I have to hold my breath a little longer. Poor little fella. What'd he ever do to anyone?

Bus ride in to work today was standing room only after about the second stop after mine so my location remains quite pristine in the pecking order. I decided to chill out with an audio book and close my eyes to imagine the bizarre chain of events unfolding in The Relic, a story about an ancient creature that ends up in a museum and wreaks havoc on the patrons and general public. This audio book narrator seems to take great delight in acting out the different voices and I find him not so good. They've also seemed to have overproduced it with sound effects such as the echo effect being applied to the voice of one of the book's characters in a cavernous area of the museum. A little overdone if you ask me. This writer has an ability to overuse adverbs and I'm not much caring for that either. Overusing adverbs seems to weaken the impact of sentences and your mind can only hear words ending in "ly" so much before it grates on your nerves I've decided. His exaggeration of the accents in the book also detract from the reading especially when all I want to hear is the sound of someone reading to me. Gag.

Today kind of sucked for the most part for no particular reason other than there was an almost palpable sense of loneliness in the air, at least until I had dinner with one of my best friends and found that his day also sucked and the past couple of weeks had increased their suction at an astonishing rate of speed in regard to changes at work. So we had a great conversation and found that our dreams had similar elements to them as of late. We both had had dreams of very social situations where there were lots of people and family in a close-in environment and everyone was having fun. I had dreamed that I'd bought a large house with a pool and filled its rooms with roommates of all types and backgrounds, one was a highly decorated general who had a sparsely decorated room with nothing but a cot, a trunk and a photo of himself with medals dripping off his dress BDUs. He was very quiet and spoke in short sentences, but paid his rent on time and hit the sack early it would appear. In another dream I was at a high society event at someone's 1.8 million dollar house with my folks trying to introduce me to a pleasant young lady by the name of Camber whose appendages were adorned with jewelry of every kind and whose body was wrapped in the finest tailored textiles of the season. I looked at her and scoffed to myself, whispering the most important question to mother, "But can she handle a shotgun?" We shook hands and as she sat down at the table in one of those folding fancy wooden chairs, she sat too far back in it and almost folded herself up in it. I laughed a little bit and moved on.

My friend had dreamed about several RVs worth of family converging together at a KOA campground and everyone having fun and piling into a shared car to go to a movie. Then he found himself in a large Victorian-style house with many rooms and it was nighttime and everyone was in their respective rooms but they were all talking of the day's activities as if they were in a large slumber party. A wonderful sense of togetherness and family pervaded in both dreams and we both were very happy to have had such peaceful dreams.

Ah dreams. I shall find more tonight I'm sure. They show up like the ice cream man, playing their little tune with me dashing out to see what flavours line the walls of the bottomless freezer, waiting eager(ly) to see what form they will take and the places to which each taste will transport me with each bite.