The Bus Bench

Black Monday prompts Blue Metro

As there is neither a recession nor a depression, then it follows that tits and ass, drugs and death, wrong and right, AIN'T. Or so Metro implies, as this single slice of the debauchery to follow clearly illustrates:

Parker Center Blood Donor Drive Distraction

Last Wednesday, while on my way to Parker Center for my 10 a.m. appointment to be bled for Metrolink's miasma, I came across Bernie Parks and Gloria Molina holding a PR event. As Browne supports both folk speaking, I stopped for a moment to record the event.

Spring Street Detritus

Call me sick, but I get glee from observing the morning results of over-excessive human behaviour.

-BusTard

 

 

Thin

have been busy, and judging from the paucity of posts on BusBench, so, too, has been Browne.

Coming out of my weeks-long work, however, I elected to watch a documentary titled "Thin." Browne suggested it, and I reluctantly agreed. It is a recent doc about eating disorders.

I was not particularly impressed, and had less sympathy for anyone involved very quickly. This did not change throughout the viewing.

I imagine many folk have commented on the poor girls' plight. I will not weigh in on that aspect, but on the staff. The people alleging to help the girls at the rather pricey clinic are indicative of the very problems that have prompted the patients to seek thinness at any price. At least half of the staff are by a strict medical defintion morbidly obese. There is a propensity for wearing name-brand fashion crap such as Abercrombie T-shirts and Adidas baseball caps that should be abolished for reason only a complete idiot would fail to immediately comprehend. And there are at least two staff members whose middle-aged attempts to remain beach bunnies - replete with bleached hair, too much make-up and ridiculously girlish clothing - are hideous as well as pathetic.

It is outrageous that people who possess their own eating disorder are being paid good money to advisehow others should resolve their own eating disorders. There is a pear-shaped man in his late 20s or very early 30s who could easily be 125 lbs. less were he to eat healthfully. There are several middle-aged women who simply do not get off their collective fat arse. Why should someone with  the problem of binging and purging listen to someone with the same problem minus the purging part?

Must I explain the bit about name brands on apparel? Very well, since the staff of the clinic under review - Renfrew Center in Coconut Creek, FL - are too damned daft to understand the bleeding obvious. Is not the fashion world in the western hemisphere what is well known to have prompted the tidal wave of eating disorders? Would you give running shoes to a man whose legs were recenlt amputated? Would you give Jesus Christ a stump of dogwood were he to come back to save your arse? What the hell is wrong with you morons?

The two women who could easily be my mother - and note that I am 40 years of age - need to give up the bleaching of hair, wearing of heavy make-up and the entire "I'm still just a surfer girl on the beach at Spring Break" bullshit. Is that desire to be a sexpot not the same one that their patients espouse yet cannot handle? It is highly unprofessional not to mention pathetic, unless one is seeking to star in MILF videos on BangBros.

In the end, all I can state is that the one girl who was pushed out of Renfrew's little community (by the same fucked-up staff who would do well to stop raiding their refigerators at night) was apparently purged owing to lack of funds albeit under the auspices of the patient being problematic.

-BusTard

Brazilian Nites via the MTA 60 from downtown LA. Hell. 2/3

My fiancé and I made several miscalculations in regards to our calculations for our trip to the Brazilian Carnaval Nites at the Queen Mary.

1. Listening to blogs that they said this was an event to go to. Those of you who recommended this have you have ever gone to the Brazilian Carnaval at the Queen Mary?

Not the one in Brazil, but the one in Long Beach. Yeah didn’t think so.

This event completely sucked. Forty dollars for what? Forty dollars for nothing that’s what. It was like a family gathering (the unfun kind, because your aunt in a g-string is not fun) in a conference room (that’s what the boiler room of the Queen Mary looks like, a conference room), yeah the dancing was fun, but it wasn’t 40 dollars fun. Also watered down seven dollar drinks and over priced crappy food, not so fun.

Forty dollars included just walking in the door. Oh and some fucking beads. 

This festival got sponsorship from the LA Weekly and some other big name companies and media; I don’t know what that money went to, because it sure as hell didn’t go into the production.

2. We also assumed the Blue Line was the best route, no. It was not. It seemed to take freakin’ days to get down there, owing to the train stopping at all of the traffic lights. What the hell is that? It’s public transport; it should have the right of way.

If you’re going to have the train stop for the lights, why spend all of that money on it?

Why not just have a bus? The blue line has been running since 1990, no plans on making that work better, oh yeah of course not. You’re a little too busy working on the Gold Line right now. That’s taking up a lot of you time, right MTA.

Fuckers…

We also sat in the wrong car initially. A person who smelled like they were dying under their mountain of clothes was fragrancing the car with a pleasant aroma…fabulous.

That’s not the MTA’s fault that was Reagan’s fault.

3. After five days, (no only four days I'm exaggerating) we finally got to Long Beach where they have a shuttle that takes you to the Queen Mary. It’s free. Great!!!! Oh not so great, it was supposed to run every 12-20 minutes, did that happen? Hell no, because that would be competence and that would be very unLA and as we all know it’s Long Beach’s dream to actually be LA instead of the stupid dorky cousin of LA, which is what Long Beach is currently.

So 45 minutes later, yes 45 minutes later and after having to hear a full conversation between very loud American, but is actually French-Canadian (she moved to the US as a ten year old after spending the ages of 5-10 in Quebec) woman who went to five thousand colleges and spent summers in Sweden, Japan, Venus, Mars and her blond guy companion from Spain who is here on business and left his jacket in his hotel room AND his cell phone who has been to Sweden, Japan, Germany, France Venus, Mars, Uranus, and Neptune and speaks five languages and three dialects of martian, but feels as if his time in Germany really messed up his Swedish, because the two languages are so close.

You know what people, if there is 20 square feet of space, why bother to use all of that space at a bus stop? Why not stand six inches behind people and talk very loudly about your personal business, because we all want to hear it.

Yeah you two super well traveled brainiacs, you’re so fucking interesting.

Yeah so anyways after that, we get to the Brazilian Carnaval where as I stated earlier a bunch of people who already knew each other danced the Samba and probably laughed in their head about the idiots who came down to watch them have fun.

“So is where is the other part,” fiancé.
“I think this is the other part,” me.
“What, like this is it?” fiancé.
“Yeah, dude this is like it,” me.
“We should have went to Little Joy,” fiancé.
“Shut-up,” me.

But you know the thing that was weird. The cops were out in force. There were police cars waiting behind valet and staring people down as they left the Carnaval. There were police cars stopping people as we waited for the shuttle. There were police cars everywhere, but the public transportation was horrible.

So what’s the deal here? They make public transport so horrible you don’t want to even take it and then they seem to over police the people who drive to parties and bars, because there is virtually no other way to get there.

What the FUCK!!!!

The fact that anyone wants to party at all in Long Beach should make the cops back off. I’m going to bet business tax dollars pay for many of those pretty cop cars, so they are kind of biting the hand that feeds them. Long Beach is not fun. Not LA fun. Sorry Long Beach people, I know Long Beach people love their little almost LA, but not quite cool enough, sort of the OC, but not enough money stuck in the 1990s town, but that city does not rock at all. And the police presence with the lack of public transit is outrageous.

Anyways owing to the fact that the rails stop running at 12am and we got out of the “party” at 1:30am we got to experience the MTA 60.

In NY when you catch the train at night at 1:30am, you experience this:

In LA when you ride the train at 1:30 am, you step on to a bus where everyone is homeless. This isn’t me exaggerating. This is actually who rides the bus at 2 in the morning in LA. Everyone has a rolling bag of their stuff and they ride from the beginning of the line in Long Beach to the end of the line in downtown and that journey takes one and thirty minutes.

The reason it takes so long is because it goes through Long Beach, then it curves and hits all of the southeast cities of Cudahy, Vernon, Huntington Park, and then it goes through Watts and some other places that I couldn’t see because it started raining and I couldn’t read the signs.

On the way some people who aren’t homeless get on. Drunk guy. Drunk guy that even though I’m with a guy, he zeroes in to talk to me. The guy I’m with has to get up and let the guy know that he will kick his ass, but drunk is still trying to talk to me, he doesn’t seem threatened by anything. He seems like he thinks he’s at the bar and he wants my phone number, but then he sits down and passes out in his seat.

The driver saw all of this, but you know, what can he do? And unlike the rails where the Sheriff is there to protect, oh I mean collect your fare; there is no security on the bus.

None at all.

I’m thinking if you have budget for security, that possibly you might use some of that on the 2:30am bus where people crawl around on the floor to find their crack pipes, but hey, maybe I’m fucking crazy.

Yeah, so that was my crazy Brazilian Carnaval Night, pretty fucking crazy, huh?

by Browne Molyneux

Aisle of Misfit Drinks

What usta be Pick 'n Save is now Big Lots, but I never became acclimated to call it "Big Lots." I still call it Pick 'n Save. (The photos at the top of the page are from an incident whereby the Pic 'n Save employees chased the shoplifter out onto 7th Street then south on Broadway; I took the photos in the mid-1990s.)

Anyway, one thing has remained the same: the bizarre aisles of apparently failed drinks. In the mid-1990s there were primarily juices; in the late '90s it was odd coffee concoctions. Now it appears to be poorly conceived sports and energy drinks.

Child rearing advice or how dirty hippies broke Browne's heart

Sometimes people want to know why I have such a bad attitude, I have to say mainly it is due to the fact that I really believed the counter culture movement.

I was born with parents who dropped acid and smoked pot and had conversations about the “man” for hours and hours. They said things like, fuck society, fuck this, fuck that, up with the people and down with corporations. They didn’t believe in marriage or god or anything, because those were all the kinds of things that oppressed people.

When I was born in the tail-end of the 70s that’s the world I came into and then after all of that, the booming rhetoric and big party stopped.

No more communes, no more drugs, no more nothing 1990 came along and the people that I was raised by decided they weren’t doing that anymore and essentially said, “just kidding.”

What the fuck do you mean just kidding? So now you want me to go to school, pay attention, listen to the man after all of that bullshit. Well fuck you, because now it’s too late. I’m totally fucked up now.

I mean how could you raise someone in that environment and then go, “just kidding.”

How fucked up is that?

What’s the point of my post? This is the point, all you hipster assholes with kids that give them faux hawks and temporary tattoos and take them to art gallery openings at 9pm, don’t be surprised when you figure out that whole free love alternative shit doesn’t work with kids. It makes them into little heathens, not artful connoisseurs with taste and culture. Once you figure that out and you want your kids to go to a good college and not be complete burn out losers and you start with the, “you should stop using drugs honey,” they are going to tell you to go fuck yourself.

Seriously that is what will happen, because that is what you told them to do. You told them to not respect authority and you being the parent which is the biggest authority in a kid’s life that means they are not going to respect you.

When I was 12 years old I told my mom to shut the fuck up and she just stood there. At that point I came under the false impression that I was invincible.  I think had she back slapped me, I’d be a better person today.

I’m a big believer in if you have kids have the courtesy to let them be kids and figure it out for themselves. That means setting limits and believing in something, something other than figuring out yourself.

People often ask me do I think I’m better off having been exposed to so much, so young and I answer emphatically “hell fucking no.” I’m not better off than my friends with normal parents that didn’t teach them how to roll a joint at eight years old. I don’t feel my world view is helping me deal with the actual real world, because I don’t understand the real world.

I have no idea how to wait. I have no respect for authority. I have no understanding of consequences. I have no clue of code of conduct. I just do whatever, but you know when you just do whatever in the real world and you’re 29 years old no one thinks that shit is very cute, but what can I do? This is who I am now. I am not necessarily blaming my parents, but you know I do blame those damn hippie counter culture poseurs.

I believed, what you believed in. I still deep down inside believe all of that shit. I still can’t wrap my mind around the fact that it was all a fad.  I didn’t know it was a fad.

How is a ten year old supposed to know you were all just kidding?

Browne

PS Where is my fucking Pepsi?

Cocaine vs. cannabis: World Prices in 2005

Unlike the ridiculously serious media of America, a demeanour of which is made all the more appalling for the ludicrous subjects promoted, the straight-ahead mindset with a dash of humour found in rags such as The Economist (always one of my favourites) allows folk to figure out which way they want to think about things that most media will not mention without overtly peddling some agenda.

Here are two examples:

Cocaine

Cannabis

YOU decide!

-BusTard

"Dazed" is the new "drunk."

Could District Attorney Steve Cooley be Rocky Delgadillo's cretinous twin? Or is Stevie looking to get on board for the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary's next explosion of new and detourned vernacular? Either way, what usta be termed "drunk" now appears to be "dazed." Could what usta be known as a "weak chin" be now termed a "gutless gob"? Stevie makes me wanna sing this song.
The domino theory seems to be in big play in L.A. politics, what with the way all these schmucks—Tony, Rocky, Stevie—are being knocked back by half-assed celebrities spewing unfounded excuses (too bad they had no script on hand) who are too stoopid to hire a driver for all the millions they make. Maybe they are all being shat out by the Andy Dick school of Stoopid over near MacArthur Park, albeit with better lawyers and more than enough money required to keep them out of jail?
Few on the street know, but as a man, lemme make this clear: Steve Cooley, you are a fucking schmuck to me. I would not let you dry my hands on the way out of the toilet.

-BusTard

KNBC Too Dim to See "Light" Rail?

NBC4 talks about looney commuters on Metrolink, but forgets not to be stupid when doing so.

On KNBC.com, a brief bit of filler about Metrolink train No. 706 that runs between Riverside and Orange County was accompanied by a photo of the two-car Green Line that runs along the 105 Freeway in Los Angeles County. It is such a glaring error that we had to pick on the barmy broadcasters as well as pick out that it is a shot from no later than 2006, to boot: the logo on the car is the old Metro logo employing Scala Sans.

Take a look at the KNBC link as well as the photos of the Metrolink and Green Line cars, and you will understand that it is not unlike confusing a Volkswagen Bug with a Hummer:

http://www.knbc.com/news/14288044/detail.html?rss=la&psp=news#

Will the real Metrolink please stand up? http://www.nationalcorridors.org/df/df10112004a.jpg

Green Line: http://world.nycsubway.org/perl/show?41304
Green Line with olde logo (Scala Sans) http://world.nycsubway.org/perl/show?40637

What else are the "news" crews at KNBC4 screwing up? Who knows?