'walking to and from various buses and places to be in between the buses'

Buses where the routes are colors seem friendly.

On boozier holidays they give you rides for free, not trips.

Metro Transit calls my rides trips. But half of them take me home. I'm not taking a trip home. I'm just going there.

Whereas to the other passengers, one who boards with a bike must seem unhappy.

To a person with a car, the idea of a transfer is almost absurd: you're going to ride two buses?!

The tactics of seat ownership. Staking and quitting a claim, policing, keeping watch, ceding, accommodating, allowing. Modes of circumspection broadcasting indifference. Ways of enacting the narrative of a journey with a meager repertoire of slumps, focusless absorption, straightenings, and recognizing glances, from within what is in reality forty minutes of sitting.

Lugging laundry onto the bus, one wishes (wishes) just to brazen it out.

In a small enough place, its intermittent routes rarely busy, boarding a bus, paying the fare, one feels: why can't you just give me a ride?