An hour to kill before bedtime

I am at present sitting at a bus stop on Hamilton Ave and Ramona St in Palo Alto, California, a thousand miles from home, at 10:10 PM on July 22, 2007. There's an hour to kill before bedtime, so I thought I'd write. Behind me, three young men and a young woman speak Chinese. They laugh at something in the shop window of University Art Center. Another group passes behind me, talking of "maybe just traveling, something like that." The same hopes, the same needs, the same amusements, a thousand miles from home.

There is something great about writing, in public or private. It is a kind of listening, to your thoughts, to voices around you, to the sounds of machines and of nature. It's a listening with your eyes and with your gut, a probing into the why of things. More voices behind me. "I'm numbing the pain." "Yeah, asshole." "You messed up."

Here you see headlights, and people holding hands, vague talk, a bit of singing, the stench of rotting fruit, a plastic cap kicked in the darkness, someone whistling C# D C, then all of a sudden, silence.