Rarely do I have the opportunity to write about things that happen to me. Here is one of those chances, so I’m taking it.

The Drug Bust

I have never really been comfortable going to bus stops late at night. While I live in a pretty safe neighborhood, the bus stops that I tend to frequent are the ones that are in the middle of nowhere; dimly-lit, and generally giving off the impression that you are in a horror movie and you are about to be murdered with a chainsaw. Thankfully, perhaps, the combination of my odd hours and remote bus stops usually means I'm the only one at the bus stop, leaving me to muse about the possibility of my violent death without fear of it actually happening. If I were to write a story about my time alone at the bus stop, it would likely reference cold weather, exhaustion, the arrival of the bus, and be generally short and uninteresting. This is obviously not one of those stories.

My experiment in lab had run late again. This came as no surprise, as most of the experiments I had been doing lately had their unexpected hiccups that set me hours behind schedule. Managing to find a good stopping point for the evening, I packed up my things and headed to the bus stop for the ride home. The Regents bus stop is in the middle of a large parking lot, dimly lit by sodium-vapor bulbs that bathes everything in a yellow light. There are only about fifteen cars left in the lot at this hour. As I walk up the hill towards the stop, a police cruiser passes by on the road. “Oh good,” I thought, “looks like I won't be getting killed tonight.” Why I thought this is utterly beyond me. Nonetheless, I made my way to the bus stop, where one other person was already waiting. Like most students, he was on his cell phone, entirely occupied by his conversation.

I have always wondered about the strangers around me, and more specifically, how it was that my fellow college students manage to spend so many hours of their waking day on their cell phones. The extent of my research on this subject has focused entirely on listening in on conversations just to see what could be so important to share. While I have heard some rather interesting conversations in the past, including one student who told his friend that he was planning to skip his court subpoena because he had class (a painfully dumb decision on many levels), what I overheard from this fellow traveler took top prize in being the most interesting.

“Yeah man, so many people want me dead right now,” he said to the person on the other end. “I gave them all my names, man, I can't have anything on my record right now,” he continued. At this point I decided I was probably safer standing at the end of the bus stop furthest away from him. The conversation continued for another two minutes, as the student gloated about his narrow escape from the law, as I managed to gather. I leant on the police call box and looked the other way. Three minutes pass, and still the bus hasn't shown up. “Damn,” I think to myself, “I must've just missed one when I got here.” Out of the corner of my eye I see the near-felon mindlessly walking around, and then he turns and approaches me.

To be continued.