Wednesday 19 February 2025
Cold clamminess gripped the city like freezing, wet sand from a riverbank in winter. The bus finally came for me to catch a ride home. Was the notorious E-Line, “E” for Express bus. Supposed to be a speedy beady bus, yes, but, alas, twas slow as mud. So many stops. So many agitated Humans in altered states jostling in the doorways like insects jerking in the mandibles of a wolf spider. The night felt scary dark beneath cloudy skies dropping cold rain. Typical hypothermic weather in Seattle. Give me clear, dry, crisp, subfreezing weather instead, but no, twas hypothermia time in the City of Cranes. Had gotten off work shortly after 21:00, walked about 0.8th of a mile or nearly 1.3 kilometers down and up hills to the bus stop over the Aurora Tunnel, and waited and waited. The beautiful Emerald City that sprawled in the narrow corridors between the Salish Sea and the Cascade Mountains felt grimy and gritty with metal forests of towering cranes. Felt like a syfy mining colony on some faraway alien planet. Seen too many movies, yeah. And now the bus. We Humans filed aboard anonymously. None of us paid a penny. It’s not enforced. So many homeless folks and drunken, drugged up addicts seek refuge on the bus, too. Who can blame them. I’d rather pay local taxes towards “free” mass public transit anyway. It’s after 22:00 on this Wednesday night in the Common Era.

Found a seat by a window in the center of the bus. Behind me a man, clearly homeless, was hunched over and unable to sit up straight. Drug paraphernalia was laid out on the seat next to him. Blackened, crumpled aluminum foil. A cigarette lighter. Dirty, little glass pipes, more like glass straws. A few other nameless items. Fentanyl. Damn. Hate the nasty stuff. Hate what it does to people. Hate fellow Humans who prey on the vulnerable and the sick to profit from mental illness and addiction and misery. Such greedy vampires hide way up the criminal food chain. Maybe they’re the ones who should be getting the death penalty. Yes? No? Is Human life any more sacred than any other living thing whether a great blue whale, an egg plant, or a bacteriophage? Only because we’ve psychologically isolated ourselves from our biosphere for so long we’ve forgotten we were ever part of Nature. When we most believe Earth is our world is when we most become the Aliens within this planet.

Felt the anger rise in me. I was about to turn around and tell him not to light it up. Like, hey! Put that damn fire out! Reached inside the small backpack in my lap and grabbed onto my metal water bottle as if it was a club. Kept my hand inside my daypack on the bottle, feeling the cool, dented metal, and didn’t pull it out, yet. The man lights a fire behind me in his seat. He holds the aluminum foil, shaped into a crude funnel, in one hand as he flicks the lighter beneath it. Flames blaze up quickly. A few inches high. He inhales fentanyl smoke directly above the flames, looks around, and waved the rest aside to disperse the smell. Thank goodness the top windows were cracked where we sat. For I have a keen sense of smell, but could barely smell anything. I relaxed my hand upon the bottle, and pulled my hand out of my pack. Before I knew it, the man slumped over asleep, lost in the euphoria of his fentanyl haze. This particular drug’s a synthetic opioid, not an amphetamine like meth that jacks users up into violent, scab-picking, rage zombies. This man wasn’t a violent threat to me. But his drugs were, and his toxic chemical mess certainly was. To himself and everyone else. Continue reading →