Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

Look, look there! It's right over the southeastern hill, the most terrible thing of them all... a paper written for freshman english! Behold the scaryness. Ooo.

Anyway...

Fist Fighting

Sometimes other people can be unbelievably stupid. It’s as if their brains never fully developed, because when they open their mouths they unleash such a terrible, negative point of view that you just want to cover your ears and say Shut up, shut up, shut up over and over again until they go away. The best thing to do when faced with such overbearing company is to simply ignore the offenders completely. It is the safest way, and the way that will least likely get you killed. When these people group, either as confidants or angry adversaries, it can be scary to be around them, even if you are in a safe place. It becomes hard to ignore them. Their slurred voices, with violent tones (and fists), don’t help much, either.
Occasionally these people ride the public bus.
It was during the summer. My sister, my friend Briauna and I were taking the bus downtown together. We were supposed to have left much earlier, and I was very anxious about being late.
The moment I got on the bus, I could tell that the strange white guy sitting in the middle of the bus was one of those weird people who smell like cigarettes all the time and is most likely on drugs. He had a look on his face that was both haunted and vacant at once (he may have taken enough drugs to lose his mind), and he was wearing a sweaty, dirty-looking white tank top that did little to veil the explosion of armpit hairs that threatened to overcome the entire bus- I swear that when he raised his arms, people died. His skin was abnormally sweaty, bright red and blotchy, and he looked as if he hadn’t had a shower in a long time. He had some pants on that looked like they would fall off at any moment.
The other occupants of the bus seemed pretty normal; there were the customary old ladies with shopping bags, the unfashionable, purple-leggings-clad blonde hair women wearing too much makeup and looking about fifty years old, and the fat freaky-looking men that look like child molesters. There were some black guys in the back of the bus, and there were free seats in front. My friends and I took them. One of the black men in the back asked the bus driver a question. I don’t remember what it was, but it obviously caught the insane white junkie’s attention.
“*****,” the white junkie mumbled.
“What’d you say?! Did you just call me a *****?” the black man asked.
“No, I didn’t say nothin’,” the junkie guy said with a slur, turning around in his seat to talk to the black guy. “I ain’t racist! Mah best friend ‘s black! Don’t you a-accuse me o’ being racist! I’m not, I swear! You, you’re messin’ with the wrong guy here, man! You don’t wanna do this, man!” He made violent gestures to the black man to prove his point.
“I am askin’ you if you called me a *****.” The black man’s voice was pointed and cold. “Did you call me a *****?”
“I am tellin’ you, you don’t wanna start this with me! You do not want to start this with me!”
“Did you call me a ******?” The black guy started walking towards the middle of the bus, where the white guy was sitting.
“I’m tellin’ you, you don’t wanna start this with me, man!” The white guy stood up. He raised his hands in agitation and/or madness.
I think that was the point at which they started punching each other (They may have argued senselessly longer). I don’t know exactly who started punching the other guy first, or exactly why they were punching anyone at all, or why no one was pulling them apart and telling them they were idiots, although I think the bus driver called the police. It’s actually kind of funny the way they were hitting each other. They were like selfish little kids with no self control. I guess I wasn’t quite grasping the severity of the whole situation, but I could tell that it was really, really stupid. The sounds their fists made while cracking against one another’s jaws didn’t sound serious, they sounded like balloons popping, or the noise you hear when you drop something hard and it hits the floor! The punches weren’t very damage-inflicting, they were girly punches.
But I guess it was kind of serious. I mean, they were punching each other.
Anyway, when they were finished the white guy threatened to call the police, and he did, and soon enough the police were talking to him, and questioning him, and doing the same to the black guy and the bus driver.
“This guy just started punchin’ me,” the white guy said, turning to address the rest of the bus. “He did, didn’t ‘e? He just started punchin’ me.”
The black guy had mysteriously disappeared to somewhere behind the bus, and so the police took the white guy out of the bus and the bus finally left.
Through all that, the bus still hadn’t left. As soon as the bus driver kicked the white guy off the bus, it left, but it was way too late for me to make it on time, anyway, which really pissed me off. Grrrr.
That is the reason why I hate public transportation. There’s nothing I really could have done about the situation, but if I hadn’t had to take the bus, I would have much preferred not to. I hate it when stupid things on the bus happen like that. They happen a lot. And through that experience I learned to never, ever, ever ride the bus or max ever again. Now, if only that was even a little bit possible…