Can’t get to sleep right now. This happens sometimes where I just can’t get over my shit. Everything comes rushing back to me. Everything I have done. Everything I have lost. The “perfect” life I pissed away. For what? A couple of years-long-bender? A couple of years of pure absolute selfishness?

I cried tonight. I fucking bawled into my hands upstairs while my parents slept downstairs. I hadn’t cried like that for a long time. The last time I cried like that I was walking down the side of the road broke and with no money and it was hot as fuck outside and I had realized that I was one of those people you glance at outside of your car window at a random stop light. I was on the other side of the car this time though. And it was a hot mid-summer Texas day. I will never forget that. It wasn’t too long after my savings and credit card ran out and I was going on meth fumes. It all of the sudden sort of hit me that my lines of credit were gone. My cash was nil. I had blown through it all. It was all gone and this is my new reality. My ex-wife happened to call at that moment and we talked about some typical mundane shit. She must have sensed my out-of-breathness or desperation. Either way, it was one of the first times since we had divorced that I heard a serious concern in her tone as she asked me,” are you alright?” I was drenched in sweat, walking down the side feeder of a random road on a hot Texas day with no destination in mind, broke, hungry, and thirsty as fuck. The only task that came to mind was to walk and not stop so as the gravity of my situation would not set in… “oh yeah! I’m fine! Hey I should go,, talk to you later!” As soon as I hung up, it hit me harder. I was absolutely FUCKED. So fuck that feeling, I reached into my pocket and grabbed the baggie of ice and snorted a pinch. FUCK THAT SHIT BURNS!!! Snorting ice stings hard. It hurts. It stings and fucking hits you quick and hard. But I digress, so back to my story… I was just another sweaty street person walking down the shoulder of a hot Texas summer road. My backpack was hot. I was sweating through my shirt. And as the sweat dropped down my brow and face, the tears from my eyes joined the perspiration and soaked my face. If you have ever been at this level of realizing a tremendous shadow of shitty-ness, you recognize the fact that once you feel an honest cry-session come on it’s almost like a drug-release feeling in itself. Endorphins… emotions…pure energy-shit. You feel some weird entity being released through your tear ducts. I walked down the side of the road. I started cough-crying and wiping my tears…. in my mind… I kept repeating… “My God….What have I done?”

So… as if that weren’t bad enough, I was high as fuck on ice and thought I should suck it up and ride the bus. I googled the app and of course got stuck in the Houston “bus riding” app. I figured if I didn’t have money or my car anymore I better learn the bus route. I’ll tell you what…It’s a fucking pride-swallowing decision to all of the sudden accept the fact you don’t have your own transportation and need to rely on public transportation. There is definitely a mental block of some kind where people just think they are above the level of riding a city bus. The closest comparison I can think of is the feeling where all your life you had flown somewhere to get there… so you go to the airport and hang around and wait around. And people for the most part in airports are courteous and polite. If you then have to take a Greyhound bus somewhere and go to the bus terminal, you notice significant differences in the income level of people in the bus terminal vs. the airport. The people are poorer, their clothes are grimier, the bus stations are much dirtier than any airport. And damn why is there always a musty piss smell? Anyways… my spoon fed fuck ass jumped on the Houston city bus and it was given reality bitch slap to the face. As I hopped on the bus, I hoped the driver wouldn’t notice me and I could just ride for free, but no. “Hey son, where’s your ticket?” He asked me. (Furious scrambling through my phone) ”Oh hey yes, sir, I have the app!” I responded. “I can find it on my phone, just need a minute. It’s on the app.” The driver let me stay on the bus and drove onward to the next stop. I sat in a seat towards the front and furiously rummaged through the Houston city bus app and could not for the life of me figure out how to process a simple bus pass. I tried to process the payment but it wasn’t clearly explained. I had to use one app to buy the tickets and sign up and register for credits, then I had to jump over to a different app and apply said credits to the purchase of a ticket. I was trying to purchase the tickets with a Visa Gift Card that had like $3.00 on it so I first had to sign up online at visa to issue an address and zip code to the gift card. Then I had to buy the ticket and apply it to the ride to use that ticket on. It was impossible to figure out. I felt everyone’s eye on me. In reality no one probably gave two shits at that point, but there was a tremendous amount of stress I felt at that moment. Almost like when someone at the cashier register hands you cash and change back and you rush to place the bills in your wallet and change in your pocket and feel the people behind you in line just staring at you. At this point, the bus driver had let me slide for two more stops and as he was about to pull away from the third one he turned to me and said , “Well, whats up son, you got your ticket?” I said “no sir, almost I’m almost there. I almost got it.” I thought he would let me slide. I mean it’s one bus ride…what could it cost? 10 DOLLARS!? (jk) But no, he yelled at me, “Son, get off my bus you wasting my time boy!” The whole bus looked at me this time.

No doubt about it. He called my ass out, lol. He re-opened the bus doors and turned and stared at me. The whole fucking bus knew the system, they knew to have a bus pass, they knew to have the pre-paid ticket on their phone already or at least enough pocket money to get to their destination. My dumbass couldn’t figure out how to make it work in the goddamned app.