Oh for fuck’s sake

My bus was twenty minutes late again. My toes hurt so bad. This makes me so angry, and worried - is this going to be the rest of the winter? Am I going to lose a toe? Totally ridiculous. I need to make a new arrangement, just plan to call and find out the actual time of the actual bus, and plan to wait for the delay from the transit hotline, instead of trusting the schedule. It’s hard to live up to my buswriting habit like this too, because all I can really think about is the physical discomfort I’m in. Ugh.

In general I hate situations like this. I get nervous about dealing with landlords and airport security, for the same reason - these are situations where someone is basically indifferent to me and my well-being and has control over something important to me. I sometimes think of it like these people are malicious, trying to create problems for others, but the reality is that they mostly just don’t care. The problem are the result of indifference, not malign intentions. In a way that’s worse because it’s so impersonal. Having someone want to hurt you is awful. Having someone hurt you incidentally on their way to something else in a way that they don’t care about, that’s awful in a different way.

Of course this bus situation is only really a problem because of the weather. We have weather that’s competitive with Siberia. I periodically check the Siberian forecast, to help myself feel better, and we really are about as bad. People went to Siberia because Stalin sent them there to die. Why does anyone live in Minnesota?

One positive, and not one that makes it worth it, is that there’s lots of room to talk with strangers about the weather. I’ve had more conversations than I could count where I’m at the bus-stop with someone and we’re commiserating about how cold this winter is, and how it compares to past winters, and why do we even live here anyway, but then there are some positives so who knows… it’s nice. Last week a man told me that he grew up in Jackson, Florida, where he once saw a police officer pull over a bus for speeding, and that he’d never heard of that happening anywhere else. Our buses here don’t seem to speed anywhere. There’s a kind of “we’re all in this together against the weather” kind of shared grievance that’s enjoyable to talk about, and a kind of friendly resignation - “well, what can you do?” that’s nice to share. I think this sort of sensibility is in a lot of the midwestern punk bands I like. I think they sound somewhat like our winter feels, and there a lot of references to palm trees as a symbol of things going well or escape fantasies; I once saw a band come back to Chicago when I lived there, they had been on tour all over, and the singer said “it’s nice to be back somewhere where people get what I’m singing about when I fantasize about palm trees. People who don’t live here don’t get it.” At this point I’d settle for living somewhere where my toes don’t go numb and painful every damn day.