The garden is poorly kept. The garden is full of dead things. The garden does not get as much sun as it should. When you are in the garden you can still occasionally hear noise from the street. The garden is inexpert. It appears abandoned.
In sum: the garden has excellent character, and it knows all the right people.
2 THE BUS
The person is rare who enjoys taking the city bus. Yet, here she is. Here I stand before you, an actual enjoyer of city buses.
The reason is this: for a person who rarely has privacy, the city bus gives you a place that can’t be taken from you—a place where you can sit and read or write, or if you are lucky listen to music on headphones, and not be bothered (too much). For someone who already has the book she wants to read, it is like a library on wheels.
The bus has an awful smell. The seats of the bus are vile and you always feel that you are going to catch ill from touching them. The people who ride the bus collectively smell worse than other people. The bus drivers will not always treat you nicely, though sometimes they appear to be absolute saints.
The back of the bus, contrary to popular opinion, is not the best place to be. It is far better to be near the front. Why? People who vomit and leak tend to go to the back. It is also possible to have people steal your shit while you are on the bus and this happens more often at the back.
When not to ride the bus—
do not ride the bus at rush hour because you will have to stand. Standing on a bus is not an experience I am prepared to defend. Late at night is the best time.
I once took a bus and the driver forgot he was a bus driver. He drove the bus somewhere he wasn’t supposed to and didn’t stop at the bus stops after a while. Finally someone confronted him. He said he had a lot on his mind, and to give him a break. I thought this was a legitimate defense.
One of the other riders called him a fucko, and the others agreed, which has to be the first time anyone has gotten a consensus with the word fucko.
3 ABANDONED WATER PARK
This is a place you have never gone to, and to which you never shall go. It is full of young people who are extremely drunk. I understand that your understanding of what it is to be young is different from what I think it is, probably more accurate, and also full of supporting identifiers that I cannot recognize. Still, picture this abandoned water park as being crammed to the gills with the stuff of life.
That it is abandoned means: it is not being used against you, like the rest of the city.
That it is full of people who are drunk means: you can understand what they are doing and why and you don’t have to fear them as much as when you wonder what they want. You can wander through the water park observing things.
The water park has lots of construction area lightbulbs in plastic cages strung on lines all through it. The man who lives there thought of this as a cheap way to make things nice for people.
Many of the ways to go from one place to another in the water park are broken. Walkways are broken. Ladders are broken. Slides are broken. Bridges are broken. There are fences where you wouldn’t think they would be. It is a bit of a maze.
If you want to be able to get around the abandoned water park without help, you need to get there when you are still sober, and you need to get there when it is still light.
The best situation at the water park is to have some friends with you and to go away from them and then to hunt for them and find them and then to go away from them and then to hunt for them and find them. In the meantime, you meet other people, many of whom are not worth talking to, but some of whom are okay.
Sometimes you are in the going away from them part of the instructions, and then you are surprised because you have fallen out of sync and one of your friends comes and hunts for you and finds you, and as it turns out, that is just as good.
You should have: licorice, a cup, a flashlight, a notebook, and a screwdriver.
You must never under any circumstances fall asleep in some far-off part of the abandoned water park. If you are tired, you should find the opera singer who (apparently) sings all the time during the day at the abandoned water park, and ask her if you can lie down on their couch.
Really, though, if you are tired, you should go home. The abandoned water park is the sort of place that attracts rather decent people, so it is likely someone will take you where you need to go.
That’s enough of my descriptions for now. I’ll put some more in later.
How things stand at this point if you haven’t been paying attention:
I go to Whistler High School; everyone hates me, except Lana and maybe Stephan (and some other people whose response to being school-victims is to try to uselessly band together). I like Lana.
My mom is in a mental hospital. My aunt is in a real hospital.
I spend most of my time thinking about joining the Arson Club, which I will do, and I am writing a pamphlet about setting fires. I have not actually set any fires yet, but I can do a better pamphlet about it anyway than some people who (maybe) have.
So—
Jan canceled the meeting with me and Stephan. He did this by just not going, which is the best way to cancel an appointment, I have found. That means Stephan went there alone and wandered around like a moron for two hours looking for us.
The other day, I went there and wandered around happily knowing I wasn’t looking for anyone. But Stephan, he went and wandered around in the dark like a moron feeling he’d been tricked. That’s a comparison of our two experiences. I am not being superior—if our positions had been switched, I would be the one scrabbling around in the dark like a mole rat. Or, actually, not like a mole rat. Mole rats are really great at being in the dark. They are totally content there. It is hard not to feel some fondness for them.
Stephan was a little mad that I hadn’t gone, and he was being a bitch about it. So, I told him about my aunt’s stroke, and my aunt’s stroke trumped his irritation. He apologized immediately. I guess he has pretty good manners.
He said he called Jan and we would meet in two days. I said okay. He said, did I want to go today to burn something. I said, I was really busy, but I would go to the other meeting, so he should make sure to go to that.
He said, of course he was going to fucking go to that. That was his meeting that he got me invited to. I said, fine, if you think so.
That’s how things are with Stephan. He doesn’t reassess things often enough. I think he is still pretty immature.
ENGLISH
In English class, the teacher, VanDuyn, announced that we were going to do a creative writing module. Someone asked what that was. The teacher said he was going to teach us to share our thoughts and ideas in fiction. A bunch of the kids got really stressed out, I guess because they think that their thoughts and ideas are completely worthless. Ordinarily, I would stick to the party line and say that everyone has useful stuff to say, but this group of kids, I don’t know. I think probably they were right to be stressed out.