Random Chaos

So the new year begins and it’s going to be better than the first, right?

FUCKING. WRONG.

I began the year with a fucking misdemeanor.

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I get on the bus and get a ticket—as ill luck would have it I don’t have a pass yet. So that’s $3 bucks spent right there to get home. To give you an idea how bad that is, it’s $6 a day to get to and from work. Assuming I work five days a week, that’s $120 a month if I don’t drop $72 on a bus pass. And this is saying ‘fuck-all’ to grocery runs and freelancing, or getting out of the house at all really.

So I’m on the bus and trying to get off when I get bumped once. I freeze up—it’s men who’ve bumped into me—and try to phase out of awareness of the situation, because it’d be bad to have a flare on the bus. I eventually get up the bus platform, flash my transfer, stand under the heat. Train’s running late.

I get bumped again. Again I try to zone out of it. The train shows up.

I notice this guy, reflected in the glass. He’s looking WAY too hard at me. Young guy, obvious jailbait, wearing aluminum foil on his teeth in the imitation of a grill. I don’t like how much attention he’s paying to me, and my mind runs through a string of expletives. Bunch of other jailbait guys talking to him, his attention never seems to switch off of me. Bored and trying to get my mind off of the fact that there are TOO MANY DUDES on this car, I do a little earhustling. I overhear him mentioning he isn’t sure where his ticket came from, that he got it from ‘some girl.’

I remember being bumped.

I slide my hand into my pocket in search of my ticket.
Half of it is missing.
I look up the reflection and I see the missing piece.

He has it.

Fuck, I think.

Security picks NOW to patrol. As they catch the kid I demonstrate what the bottom half of a ticket is supposed to look like—with the other half of said ticket. Of course the halves match up.

“So, ‘some girl’ at the mall, huh?”

“WE DO NOT KNOW EACH OTHER,” both the kid who got hustled by my pickpocket and I say.

“Do I look like I associate with someone his age?” I add.

However by this point it’s too late to do much defending—the fact that he happens to have the back side of my ticket works against me. No amount of convincing is going to do anything, now that the ticket isn’t in one piece.

Insisting that we don’t know each other we get herded into the next stop’s security station.
The station is uncomfortably tiny. Every officer is male. Every officer is big. Every officer is also being a condescending ass when Jailbait and I insist that we don’t know each other from Adam.

The panic attack, luckily (or not) gets knocked off the rails right away when one of the officers calls me a liar outright.

There aren’t a lot of things that will knock me right out of a flare—but being called a fucking liar is one of them. Of course I object. Vociferously. I stop short of detailing the assorted parentage of the rent-a-cops in the room, but by the time I’m cut off—by an officer who DISREGARDS my request that he not approach at that angle—we’ve got our points across.

…and two tickets.

In retrospect Kid Jailbait got as screwed as I did—like I said, we’ve never fucking met, he’s jailbait, he ADMITTED that the two halves did in fact form a perfect match and he wasn’t sure where the person he got that half from got it, and neither of us has anything to gain from such a STUPID hustle.

But I still have thirty—wait, twenty-nine—days to pay off a fucking ticket now.

All because some DICK boosted two-thirds of my bus ticket.

*sigh*

2013, you suck.