The Next 46 hours

fear not my peeples, your friendly neighborhood flash has made it his new mission in life (or at least the next 30 minutes) to keep markphillip.com from falling into a state of malaise. yes, i am here to save your uniververse starting with everybody’s favorite blog. and after that i’m setting my sights on the austin mass transit system.
first of all, i would like to point out that like my host (that would be mark—my blog host—not the human body which i have overtaken in order to move undetected among the masses of unsuspecting apes which have infested the planet) i am a staunch advocate of public tranportation. i could give you all of the environmental and social reasons why i am a proponant of mass transit but i’m not here to sell you a monorail…yet. so let’s just cut to the heart of the matter which is that austin’s method for moving people from one place to another just sucks. case in point:

this past saturday i had the pleasure of riding the bus from katie, beth, will shad, and mark’s place on west 6th to my “swinging bachelor pad” on east airport. first let me say that this bus, as most of the buses in the city do, stops running, at about 12. on a saturday night. from downtown. that’s like telling everybody who goes down to 6th street on the weekend to party “please drink and drive. our vehicular homicide rate is dangerously low.” but i digress. this is not about involuntary manslaughter, this is about the bus ceasing to run. literally.

anywhoo, i get on the bus and there are maybe 6 people on it. i don’t really know because when i get on a vehicle of mass transit i try not to make eye contact or notice the presence of any human beings whatsoever. however, there were 3 human beings on this particular bus were darn near impossible to ignore. there was a man and a woman, both piss drunk and sitting next to each other. i couldn’t really tell if they knew each other or not but this man seemed to be think that he knew the woman pretty well because he kept calling her his “girlfriend” despite the fact that she seemed fairly annoyed by him. the third was the gentleman (and i use the term loosely) behind them, harassing them both. the three of them were all yelling at each other in drunkenese which i do not speak without the aid of an interpreter (preferably jim beam or jose cuervo) and, in an effort to keep the peace, the bus driver was yelling at all 3 of them. at about martin luther king junior boulevard the man sitting next to the woman got off but not after standing in the door of the bus having words with driver, telling him to have the man that was sitting behind him arrested for touching his woman to which the bus driver replied that “i’ll have you arrested if you don’t get off my bus.” it was beautiful. then as the bus continued up lamar the most glorious thing happened the bus began to DIE! the bus driver seemed surprisingly nonplussed by this but as i looked at the faces of my fellow passengers (that is all 1 of them that was, like me, quite sober) i could tell that a dead bus was a very plussing matter and so i be came quite plussed and just wee bit panicky. but lucky for me (and cap metro) the bus driver cycled through the start-up of the bus again and we were headed to our ultimate destination…the mobile police station which is hancock center. the woman of repute got off somewhere in the 20’s. and the man in the back contined to elicit loud edicts from the bus driver of “HEY! DON’T YOU FALL ASLEEP BACK THERE!” and “SIT UP OR I’M CALLING THE COPS!” naturally, the only two people at the terminus of this jrney were myself and “the man who couldn’t stay upright.” the bus driver let me out at the northeast parking lot of the hancock center in which (this is the truth) there was police vehicle that looked like an ambulance and was equipped to do onsite blood and breath tests about 6 police cars AND a paddywaggon. after my departure, the bus driver handed my inebriated cohort over to austin’s finest which so elated him that he puked all over everywhere. my long ordeal over, i happily made my way through the gauntlet of muggers and rapists that set up shop underneath i-35 after dark. and after a brief, but painful, defiling of my anal sphincter, at last found myself safely at home. all i can say is that i’m just glad that when the man that was thrown off the bus with me puked on my leg…

i was wearing mark phillip‘s sweat pants.