I didn’t have time to post something last night because my bus was late by two hours. Boarding was delayed by an hour, and more time was wasted when the bus had to backtrack to drop off someone in Longview. Earlier in the day, I parked a car on the westside and bused over to work, Fortunately (or unfortunately for lack of material), I didn’t have another singing passenger like I did on my last train trip. I did get a chance to chat with a couple guys while standing in line.

I talked with this one teenager when I asked about his guitar. We started chatting a little about music and each other’s travel plans. He was heading to Tacoma before eventually reaching So Cal. I then told him that I was heading to Portland for my little sister’s graduation party. “Wait,” he said, “how old are you?”

“How old do you think I am?”

“I thought you were like 18 or somethin’.”

I paused.

“26.”

“Are you serious??? No way you can be 26! Do you get carded all the time when you get alcohol?”

“Yup.”

He was floored about me looking like a high schooler. I get it all the time and it doesn’t bother me much. (I once went to get my tires rotated last month, and while the guy was finishing up the paperwork, he tried to make small talk by asking me if I went to the local high school.) In a way, it’s sort of a compliment.

While he was still trying to figure why I looked like I was trapped in puberty, he ended up flooring me with the next question.

“Dude, how’d you look like that? Do you do drugs?”

Umm… no.

Anyways, the rest of the ride ended up being tiring and long. We even got stopped at the bridge when a ship was going through. (I wanted to ride the bus so I’d avoid the stress of driving, go figure.) I managed to bang out a few sketches during the trip.¬† Early in the trip I was sketched whatever came to mind, but as the night wore on, I began by doing a random scribble and trying to make an image out of it.¬† I was on the last pages of my moleskine and I wanted to finish it off before I arrived.¬† It might be a little hard to make out some of these images since I was constantly rotating the pad to find the idea.

There was a little kid sitting in front of me with an older woman (she wasn’t the mother because she would give them her phone to call “mommy”).¬† The boy wanted a drink of her iced tea.¬† As he was drinking, the bus hit a bump in the road and ended up splashing in the poor kid’s face.

I was using one of my bro’s pens that he used back in college about 10 years ago.¬† By this time the pen was starting to wear dry and so was my patience.¬† I just wanted to get off the stupid bus instead of making these near impossible scribbles to work.

I got to the greyhound station at 7:00pm in Seattle.  I arrived in Portland by 1:00am.  So much for a stress-free ride.