The Difference

If it had been him, it would have gone differently.

Two attractive young women on the bus needed help figuring out the local train system on their way to a convention centre.  That system consists of only one train, but the pair of gap-toothed old drunks who were trying to give them directions made it sound more confusing than the London Underground with all the signs rewritten in Cyrillic.  It wasn't that they were giving bad directions - they were just in that stage of drunkenness where you're still coherent but think you're not, so they kept giving the same directions, over and over, slightly rephrased.  Each repetition made the out-of-town ladies look a little more lost.

You can't interrupt them, either, because that will only make it worse, so you have to wait for the ladies to get off the bus to tell them you're going the same way they are.  The girls are dressed very nicely, but not for business - not the skirts or suits I'd expect going to Rexall Place, more like slightly-more-respectable clubbing outfits (but no less revealing), stylish makeup and hair, and the very definition of fierce heels.  They're friendly and bubbly and very grateful for simple directions they can understand.

I can hear in my head the story he'd tell me next week, if it had been him.  They would have been high-priced call girls on their way to a convention of small arms dealers.  They would have been working for a corporate espionage firm as part of a complicated scheme to blackmail a middle manager into stealing some files.  He would have scored them some blow and in exchange, received a black business card with red printing - no name, just a picture of a spider and a phone number in Amsterdam.

But it was me, so they were just two nice girls in a strange town who needed directions.  I told them to get off at Coliseum, and follow the signs; I wasn't going that far.

Post Script, 3:00AM: I relayed all this to him, and he laughed, and then he pointed out that Rexall Place isn't a convention center, and the girls were obviously here to see Lady Gaga.  Kind of ruined it for me a little, not least because, dammit...  I could totally have scored with the brunette if I was thinking about what I was doing instead of what he would have done.  There's a lesson here, I'm sure.

Mad Transit

Having finally established myself with a physical address, ADSL line, and bookshelves (these being the basic necessities), I've got around to redesigning the blog as I promised in a bunch of posts that are now gone, and am finally going to be actually updating it.  Starting now.

I have a complicated relationship with mass transit systems.  On the one hand, I don't like to drive and indeed do not have a license or vehicle, and I think the effects of the personal automobile on North American life and city planning are hardly salutary.  On the other hand, I have no sense of time and little sense of direction, and a long history of getting on a bus to go to a friend's house and finding myself at the airport, or in a Montreal hotel, or...  Any place I didn't intend to go, and will have a hard time getting back from.

Currently I have to take three buses to get to work.  This is tolerable because, first, I am a grown man and can deal with day-to-day life without obsessing, and second because I have obsessively memorized every landmark along the way and where other frequent riders get on and off relative to my own stops.  This, of course, requires remembering them, which requires paying some attention to them, and a kind of weird one-sided intimacy develops.  I have to remind myself that I can't tell that one skinny blonde that "craby" isn't a word, and 42 Across should be "cross".  I feel sad when Veronica (my nickname obviously, not her real one) disappears and Betty is left riding to school alone, and then a bit worried soon after Betty stops turning up too.  I feel kind of inexplicably fond of Bird Lady and Sadness Claus.  This isn't just a means of navigation, it's also a coping mechanism, because getting into a large vehicle over which I have no control terrifies me.

The relevance of this to writing, apart from the basic relevance of any of my bizarre phobias and neuroses, is that mass transit has foiled me in that realm too.  In the short story I'm currently really, honestly close to finishing, I am stuck in a train station.  I have some information I need to establish, and some other information I want to smuggle in, and the train station is where it must all go down.

Unfortunately, the train station scene is a slow, largely pointless mess, and much too long, and it keeps getting longer as I try to fix it instead of shorter, but at the same time harder and harder to cut as more of that information being established becomes integrated into later scenes.

I should have written a scene with the characters just walking somewhere.  I rarely get lost on foot...