Boston to NYC to NJ

Pardon me, busy streets. I'm just a simple man from the country side...

If you don't know what bus to take from Boston to NYC, just show up to South Station and wing it. That's what this champion did. Looking online is frustrating, the schedules have asterisks everywhere, and you can't tell who is trying to scam you the hardest. I show up, there's like six bus lines all going express to NYC. I choose the one with the WIFI for $25 and over an hour into the ride, I go to see where this thing is dropping me via the internet, and it doesn't work. Boohoo, right?

My favorite person on this bus is the guy that looks like Anthony Hopkins. When boarding, he sat by the window and put all his shit on the other seat, like some asshole power move, to ensure that nobody could sit next to him. By the way he looks like Anthony Hopkins in the way that you don't think about the way Anthony Hopkins looks like. Think less Silence of the Lambs Hannibal Lector and more the aged Quasimotoesque Anythony Hopkins. And then put an unlit smoking pipe in his mouth. Anyway, two minutes into the ride, he looks to the person on the other side of the aisle and says “is this the air conditioning? This can't be the air conditioning, it's hot air.” He says this loud enough so other people can hear and looks around as if he's about to start a “where's the fucking air conditioning?!” riot. What this guy is oblivious to is that all we care about is that the bus is moving. He then goes and has a chat with the driver about who knows what. Every so often he just gets up and walks around list the host of a party and chats it up with people.

My actual favorite person on the bus is the guy next to me. Never said a word. Not sure if he can even talk. He typed for fifteen minutes on those computer screens you see in movies where someone is hacking into a computer system and then he sat frozen for four hours. He never ate, drank, or went to the bathroom. There may as well have been a bag of sticks with a tshirt next to me.

Get off the bus and just walk around a five block radius of Penn Station for a couple of hours. Impending rain was looming so I pulled into some pizza place. Still had time to kill so I went to the crappy bar next door for a beer.

The bartender, a middle-aged woman who I learned is named Tracy, aggressively greets me with "Hey, Honey, how old are you?" "Twenty-eight. Thanks for asking." I walk all the way to the end of the bar to avoid the cluster of regulars. She then walks over and asks for an ID and I show her. She wonders if I am in the military and hands me a beer. "You look like you're in great shape." "Thanks." She goes to the other end of the bar. Now she's back. "You must be from out of town." "Boston." She blabs about the marathon bombings and with half a beer left, I agree with her that it was bad. She walks to the other end of the bar. Now she's back. "I've never seen Mad Men, but you look like that show." I try to make sense of what she said and say, "Like clean cut?" "Yeah, like a military guy." "Well, maybe, I am." Glass empty. She yells "goodbye" as I walk into the rain.

In New Jersey now and leave early in the morning.
Goodnight.