If this weekend were an animal, it would be an eight legged dragon bear wearing a sombrero, gyrating to the rhythm of a rain dance, imploring the gods to shower the earth with the laughing tears of El Señor Cuervo.

If this weekend were a school bus, it would be the Magic School bus and it would not be stopped in Philadelphia at 4am.

It appears the Megabus I am on has a mega problem. Four passengers we were to pick up have tickets but do not have seats. The bus driver, who sounds and looks uncannily like Morgan Freeman, just woke everyone up and said, “folks, we have a problem and I need everyone to get out their reservations, cause we got overbooked or something.”

He checked everyone’s tickets and we all are legit. At this point, I’m not sure what we’re waiting for, but if someone needs to sit on somebody’s lap, I call not it.

There is a restless woman with a foreign accent who is pacing the aisles of the bus declaring, “Driver, driver, let us go, this is disgusting, it is so annoying, let us go, I have to work, it’s time, it’s time–time to be a bus driver and drive this bus.”

The driver seems to agree with her and is muttering under his breath that he “cannot believe this shit.”
Another guy is chiming in with, “Come on man, I’m gonna miss my flight.”

The first woman is now giving the driver rather unsound advice: “Driver, you are going to have to drive like fucking crazy to get us on time.”

If only we had a Guatemalan chicken bus driver aboard. We could put a gallo beer in his hand, throw him in the driver seat and we’d make the jaunt from Philly to NYC by the time he finished his third beer.

I’m returning from DC where this morning I woke up an scrawled in my notes on my phone: life is full of legitimate questions, like: why am I waking up in Washington, D.C. nursing a tequila hangover that bites like an eight legged dragon bear who’s been led to believe that my face tastes like bacon.

This weekend had a lot of attitude, including a bite sized high school and college reunion.

On Friday my friend from high school Anna rolled through NYC with her parents. On the J train to a rendezvous with them I booked a 1am bus ride to DC to visit another classmate, Kate who randomly (absurdly[seriously how small is this world]) is roommates with a friend from the hazy undergraduate parties of my days at NDSU, where the red solo cups were always filled with Busch-lite and no one ever had to ask how long that slice of pizza had been lying upside down on the floor (it didn’t matter, because you were going to eat it regardless if the answer).

It’s good that we’re all friends now since in third grade Anna and Kate were the worst enemies a ten-year-old could have. They did not appreciate my “performance art.” My art mainly consisted of putting my taco salad in my chocolate milk and imbibing it, and the occasional consumption of paste and grasshoppers. This was done to impress them and they repaid me by tattling on me like the little girls they were. . .

The journey to DC was colorful, since it’s apparently a requirement that everyone on the 1am bus be loaded. I was no exception, having spent the last three hours at a Cinco de Mayo fiesta of two friends I met last fall on the subway. On the way to the party, my friend Bruce and I met a girl on the subway who came out to the party, making her a third generation subway friend. I really have no idea why people go online to meet friends and spouses since the subways are filled with such potential people…

I’m developing a pattern it seems of visiting Kate from states away with less than 24 hours of notice:

When I was a freshman in college a friend of mine had gambled his way to a small fortune of $40,000 playing online poker. This was at a time when a full tank of gas made you wealthy. He ended the semester poorly: $15,000 in credit card debt, a drinking problem, and he had to drop out and move back home. But before that fall, we used some of his winnings to book next day plane tickets to Ohio to visit Kate. We stopped off at the court house to pay my friend’s $500 fine to the Ohio court system for underage drinking, which the Bowling Green justice system did not share our gusto for.

Anyways, in the course of writing all this, we are back on the road with a sunrise burning on the horizon, begging the day to dawn, and making me think I should attempt to get a bus nap in before I return to NYC’s glorious galore.