just to leave Moncton

Second bus is an overflow charter bus, a Gray Line that’s Orleans/Acadian subsidiary owned. It is taking people for the Halifax Airport and Dartmouth before filling remaining seats with Halifax bound. No Sackville, Amherst, Springhill, Oxford, Truro, Antigonish, Capers or Newfie bound. They’ll be on other busses out of Moncton.

Some insanely stressed onboard. Freaking about their luggage and a perceived “segregation” of passengers. Just because she works for herself but may have to hire in the new year and she’s large enough for two seats and too loud talking all the time as if it’s her wind that’s the only thing running this bus, and has several equally large offspring clutched to her of whom, the daughter, hasn’t been back in 11-years since they moved to Ottawa and they happen to be black people and are heading to Fairview by taxi from the Highfield Square bus stop in North-end Dartmouth [my stop too, that why I on this same freaking bus] doesn’t mean that they’re being segregated. How freaking paranoid to think that organizing three buses of passengers going somewhere along the same bus route is segregation!

I hear the “segregation” word repeatedly but I can’t respond to her self-centred delusion. I want to tell her, Shut up and breathe. Shut up and rest. The bus company been running this route longer than you have. They know what they’re doing. If everyone going to the airport and Dartmouth is on this bus then all of our tagged luggage will also be on this bus. That’s how it works. When the ticket collector come onboard she starts yammering at him about the luggage. He tries to reassure her. It doesn’t take. Then she confesses that at least one of her pieces is labelled “Halifax-Dartmouth” not “Dartmouth” or “Highfield, Dartmouth” like the rest. So that it: she doesn’t want to be responsible for the possibility that someone else might misinterpret her stupidity in labelling excess luggage. How did she ever get this far?

All this before we ever left the Moncton terminal. This was the first time in well over a year that I’ve arrived at the Moncton terminal in weekday daytime and not seen the bus met by the crew of undercover RCMP led by baldy with the push-broom mustache. Nice present.

T: grey knit
loc: Gray Lines coach
temp (?) -14 C
sound: yammering all around and in my head