Day 1: Post a recent photo of yourself and 5 interesting facts about you.
Factoid 1: I peed my pants on a Greyhound bus. (And I was past the age of consent).
It all happened on a 20 hour bus ride from Delaware to Atlanta. At the first stop, one of the passengers got off the bus long enough to go into the depot and bring back some cigarettes, which he was promptly informed by the driver that he would not be able to smoke, and some Reese’s cups. He offered me some of the candy. I declined. He had been acting strange enough from the get-go so that I sat as close to the driver as I could on the nearly empty bus. Not my usual m.o.
We began our tedious trek south and I began to smell cigarette smoke from the back of the bus. The driver asked him to discard the cigarette from the front of the bus. No loud speaker needed–there were so few passengers and besides, it was dark and the few other passengers were trying to catch some sleep. I couldn’t. The pair went back and forth a bit–the man saying he wasn’t smoking; the driver saying that he couldn’t use the restroom as a smoking room.
We weren’t five miles from the depot when we were stopped by a police cruiser who asked for the man; apparently the driver decided he wasn’t going to have a tit for tat. The officer asked the passenger for the candy and cigarettes he stole. Stole? They searched him, the bus. Nothing.
He claimed not to have stole anything, but was still escorted from the bus. And we were on our merry way.
Around D.C. a snow storm from the North had screwed up the schedule and my transfer was delayed. This depot, a real station actually, was packed to the gills. A lot of people were returning from their Thanksgiving vacations.
When I was finally able to begin my trek again, I was dog tired and apparently fell into a coma-like sleep now that I was on the “Express” to Atlanta. In the back of the bus–this one was full of passengers and a good deal of college students were back there–I got as comfortable as one might up against a window with a coat balled up as a pillow.
I dreamed about using the bathroom. Should’ve been a trigger. But it wasn’t. When I woke up, around North Carolina or a couple of hours from Atlanta, my jeans were soaked. At first I was convinced I had sat in something and was too sleepy to realize until it was too late. But I hadn’t sat in anything. Except my own urine. That was a cold damp two hours back to the A.
And then I got the cabbie from hell who decided to drive me through hoods I had no business seeing and telling me stories I had no business hearing. What I remember of the stories is being convinced I was gonna die at the hands of a taxi-driving serial killer. And pissy no less.
Factoid 2: I have 4 tattoos and 5 piercings.
Factoid 3: I kissed a boy (and I liked it).
Factoid 4: I have an irrational fear of mice. Irrational because they are smaller than me; I could crusha dem like a cockaroash. Yet I doggedly research their behaviors and search for any signs of the likes anywhere I live. All the time.
Unlike my recently resolved fear (I’m still rather uncomfortable but don’t do the screaming running performance I used to do) of all dogs great and small, which seemed to come from nowhere considering that I had grown up with dogs as pets and neighbors all my life, this fear has a history and a basis.
See, I lived in two places that opened my walls–for maintenance reasons–and invited the critters into my home as well as introduced me to my fear. (Thanks guys).
Factoid 5: I prefer to be awake from 10 p.m. to, like, 5 p.m. and sleep a few hours during the day. But as it turns out, I am not independently wealthy and have chosen a career that will not allow that. So I’m going to bed now. Or something like that.
darlene anita scott 