Get on the bus, tell the driver a story about getting jumped and robbed so she lets you on the bus for free. Moan a lot, your arm pulsing in the sling. “Four broken ribs and I already got degenerative disc disease, so that ain’t helping,” you tell the guy sitting across from you when he asks. Stand up, move to a single seat in the back.

Things I saw while travelling on the SkyTrain to go buy a car: a dirty construction worker drinking beer and talking on his phone, his words husky and disorientating like the taste of cigarettes. His friend, also on the phone ends his call with “Yeah, swing by,” and then adds “I love you too,” before hanging up. Out on the other side of the platform a pretty girl in a skirt and leather jacket, black pumps with bows on her feet, coming home from her job at the mall.

I will sit on the bus next to the guy with the cut up face, our knees now touching, despite how wide he has his legs spread. His phone rings and he gives someone instructions on how to reset some breakers having to explain the process many times, over and over again. “The box next to the sign up computer…no, don’t do anything with the box outside…no there’s three, 38, 48 and 49.”

Back on the bus after so many weeks spent on a bike in the middle of nowhere. Glassy eyed commuters gripping the hand rail and swaying. But I like the crisp cold, the snow capped mountains in the distance and this feeling that isn’t quite home.

Writing a manifesto…and boom…my brain is toast like space ghost, like marshmallows left in the bowl too long. “You look tired,” somebody said to me at work today, and suddenly it was all I could do to claw back the fatigue.

I like twenty-five cent peep shows and I like to feel smart. I’m riding the bus and I think you’re awesome because when I shiver you ask me why I don’t own a proper winter jacket. The Italian man on the bus is holding a strange black plastic bag tightly closed with a white hair clip. He is flirting with the women in the ivory coloured wool jacket. “I run around False Creek, ten kilometres,” he says in his charmingly askew English and points out the window into the darkness. “Cool,” she replies. “Do you want to go to Metrotown on Saturday and get your picture taken with Santa?” He laughs and tells her about a cocktail he invented and then about a sommelier who keeps poking him on Facebook.