?>

News From the Back of the Bus

The 40 minute bus ride to school is normally silent. What do you expect from a bunch of teenagers at 6:30 in the morning? Or rather, any time before midday-afternoon. However, the ride home, although shorter (I’m first on first off) is much louder, and a good deal more entertaining. Being an junior, I sit near the back, not in the back, but near. The last few rows are reserved for a pretty scary bunch, but it actually can turn out to be some of the most interesting conversation you’ll hear. It seems to be an unspoken understanding that ‘fuck’ has to be used at least once in a sentence to be grammatically correct, and heavier usage or a mixing of other swears is encouraged. I don’t really see the point in this, I guess it’s probably got something to do with rebelling against the idea of what is essentially a banned word, but I wouldn’t accredit this group with that much thought. I don’t mind, it’s just a word like any other, big deal, where it gets fun is listening to the conversation in between the expletives. For kids who’s clothing style would identify them with those averse to culture fads and society in general they are a rather gossipy bunch. My ears pricked up one afternoon at the name of girl aforementioned here. I worried for a minute that she was friends with these people, but was relieved when the conversation resulted in no one really knowing her but thinking she was nice, one of them told an anecdote in which they had showed up at her house one time for some reason and been invited in. I wondered if I would be greeted the same. Probably not. Oh well, that’s not what I’m talking about now. The influence of drugs can be picked up easily from some of their stories in such phrases as “I have no idea why I was there.” More often than not the influence of drugs is mentioned directly. One time the entire bus ride home consisted of a discussion on LSD. There are sometimes glimmers of intelligent conversation in the form of a hot political issue in the news being mentioned, but quite often they have the complete wrong idea about it, which annoys me more than anything else. You can swear and be as drug addled as you want, but being ignorant is going too far. They tend to be extremely politically incorrect, if not down right racist, and sometimes it’s hard to distinguish whether or not they’re joking, which scares me. I had been under the impression that this was the 21st century. I often find myself wondering about the parents who produced these horrors. How negligent were they? Or were they negligent at all? Newtown is a pretty affluent place, but that can go both ways really.

This afternoon as one of them walked down the aisle to join his comrades he proclaimed, “Hey, I support abortion now.” It didn’t turn out to be the in depth political discussion one might expect. I wonder who he knocked up…