"Not that there's anything wrong with that ..."

At the bus station, I saw these two guys. Yes, they're guys. I thought the uniform they had chosen was an interesting one, but fit along with the stereotype. It's not unusual to see gay men, except for when you're in Provo. Then it's unusual. Although as my gay friend who used to live in Provo tells me, it's not as unusual as one might think, they're just more careful. I thought that was going to be the most exciting thing that happened to me on the bus today, but I was completely surprised.

I had no idea when I began writing this post that I would have the strangest experience on the bus to date.

It began when I sat down at the back of the bus and the most convenient open seat on the bus required me to step through a strange conversation about the nature of God, the universe and religion. I should have taken that for a sign. Fortunately, I had my iPod going and the bus engine was right behind my back, but the breaks between songs let me catch some of the undoubtedly uncomfortable conversation. Let me begin by describing the guy.

He had this interesting haircut, where it was all short, but the hair on the very top was really long and swooped back on the bottom. He was missing some of his front teeth. He was also carrying a tribal drum around with him. He had this great aloha shirt, cargo shorts, and some really nice new hiking boots. It wasn't an unusual picture for the bus, but given some context (which I'll get to later), this will make the outfit that much more strange.

As I already mentioned, I was listening to my iPod, so I didn't get pulled in as much as I'm sure I would have been had I not had my head in my music and reading. Also, I was out of his field of vision. Here are some of the topics they covered on the course of the bus ride. Mostly covered by this guy.

• Nature of the universe and religion with a guy across the bus who looked and sounded like Richard Dreyfuss in What About Bob? This guy above actually said "It's different things, but it's like essence, man."
• He had emptied an opaque energy drink container and filled it with some kind of liquor, which he drank to help the trip go faster. It certainly fueled much of the journey's conversation. By the way, that's against the UTA rules.
• Something about the acidity of something that seedy people inject shrinks your veins, so you have to drink water to make your blood vessels bigger. I wasn't paying very close attention to that one because it involved needles and it seemed like total crap anyway.
• He was homeless. Currently. He had all of his belongings with him, including a sleeping bag, a bag of clothes and his freaking tribal drum. And really nice hiking boots. I tell you, if I were homeless, I wouldn't be lugging around a drum. Unless it magically conjured food. Which leads me to the next bullet point:
• He said something like "You know, I eat out of the trash every day and I don't have Hep A, Hep B, [he named some other diseases here that I didn't care enough to remember]. I wash it down with [some kind of liquor that I don't remember the name of]. I know I don't have them because I get tested often through The System."
• Which is how it came up that he has been part of the criminal justice system since back when he was a juvenile and had to get frequent testing as part of his probation to see if he's clean.
• Worked today for some guy in Provo who paid him in bikes. Until this afternoon.
• He can visualize and sculpt hair into shapes he's never imagined before. (If you can tell me how that works, I couldn't figure that one out.) Not just cut and style it, but he can just imagine it and put gel in it and then sculpt it like it was clay. Once, he made big elephant ears on the sides of someone's head out of hair and a trunk. He made an elephant head out of someone's hair and then months later, his friends tell him about other people they've seen with animals sculpted out of their hair. Where are all those people with hair animal sculptures hanging out? I've never seen one.
• He said something about telling jokes to yourself that you don't laugh at just to keep your mind occupied while you do something with the gutter. I don't know about you, but I like the jokes I tell in my head. I think I'm a funny person.
• And then he was talking to the Hispanic guys next to me about his white supremacist friend. Talking to them, he used the word 'homie' a lot.

The one time I got pulled into the conversation, he looked at my Lenny Kravitz shirt and asked who it was. I told him it was Lenny Kravitz, which launched him into some discussion about Lenny deciding to rock rather than be a rastafarian that I only kind of listened to because I was watching my episode of Mission: Impossible. And then when I got off the bus and waited for the train, he yelled over the fence, "Hey, man. Kravitz really rocks man. I know." And then he started singing a Lenny Kravitz song for me. It was, um, a nice thought.

Again, God bless El Steve for inventing the iPod. It keeps me out of conversations I don't want to be included in, because they're so strange it's better to just document them as an uninvolved observer.