DA BOTCH.

Laughs for Gaffes

The bus driver, once again, flips the pedestrian "the bird." So, the pedestrian rides the bus, figuring: "He can't give me the bird any more, because I'm riding the bus." Then, the bus driver slams on the brakes, and the pedestrian -- "Oooh!" she says -- falls out the door. She's a pedestrian again, and the bus driver is always the bus driver, he's always been the bus driver. He gives her the bird. She takes the new route home, but there's always a bus, and in that bus, under the little lamp, there's usually a bus driver, who flips her the bird. "Is it in their job descriptions," she thinks, "to flip me the bird?" She buys a can of black spraypaint, but doesn't really know what she's doing. She shakes it, rattling those little balls in the can, and sprays a terrible doodle on the wall, the wall of the newspaper building, the newspaper that always tells you what you think they're gonna tell you. She yells at her boyfriend, that night, and he says, "yeah yeah yeah." The next day, she yells at a colleague, too, over an ambiguous break room encounter. The colleague has a tattoo, just above the sock-line, that reads, "Beers beers beers." She thinks "yeah yeah yeah", she thinks "beers beers beers." She would invoke the loud legend of her God, but he's at the track, playing the ponies, or he's at the track, wearing a fedora, with his stinky armpit stains. She steps into the evening, just as the bus drifts down the street. "NOT IN SERVICE," it goes, on its forehead, passing her without incident, but leaving her, clap, clop, to walk the city, in Autumn chill.