"The bus was an experience which truly showed the heart of the city and which varied depending on the part of the city the bus was in. In this section, the University District to Ballard, it tended to be quiet weirdos, loud weirdos, totally middle of the road new generation business men (who read the Seattle Times and tried not to look uncomfortable in their suits), or students. His experience on the bus was mostly one of scholarship, or rather he would read vigorously, shutting out the world around him and occasionally peeking his head out of the words to check his location. To be able to read on a moving vehicle, he had had to train himself, tune certain parts of his brain into not reacting to the movement of the bus and rather focusing on the movement of the eyes across the landscape of words. He was very pleased with himself whenever he thought of it. The bus allowed certain opportunities such as this which were not an option on the bike. This made him feel less guilty about leaving his spry little bike hiding in the bike room, gathering dust. He read and sometimes wrote. When he wrote he would look out in front of him into the infinite cave of thought, or observe his neighbors for inspiration. At this moment, on this day of his riding, just in front of him, in the seat before him, were two young men, students it seemed, who thought everything was funny and whose laughs were an awkward ordeal that couldn’t hide their own uncomfortableness with their own man bodies and man voices and man to man relationships.
One of the two man-boys was a small giant with knobby sausage fingers, whose nails looked like small square plates pushed deep into putty. These fingers were the outlet of his insecurities and his uncomfortableness. He grabbed the purple plastic handle on the seat in front of him like he was grabbing the ears of a small child, big putty hands on each side of the thing, and he began to thumb at the middle for no reason at all, his oily thumb tips massaging the hard plastic. He would do this and also use his thumb-looking fore fingers to roughly stroke the thing with outward motions. The third and grossest of the activities with this poor plastic handle was a right handed twisting and stroking, some unconscious masturbatory gesture he hadn’t yet excelled from expressing. Henry’s face twisted up in disgust. This was not the morning image that he wanted. He couldn’t stop watching though. The man-boy couldn’t stop molesting the thing either, like there was still some un-oiled surfaces he had to cover with the sick ritualistic gestures of a pastor with his altar boy. Henry began to express his feelings of disgust on the page, describing the display very much similarly as this narrator has done above, his script jarred often by the bumps.
When he was reading on the bus, he always got the feeling like something was going on that he needed to see, some scenery or event, something he couldn’t see just anytime. He could have gone without the man-boy event. But, when he was not reading, just staring, and nothing happened, as it was apt to, he felt as though he should be productive and read. He couldn’t win, even with himself. There were always at least two books to read, and two notebooks in which to write. Besides that he kept a camera. He liked to take pictures and didn’t care if they turned out to be anything or spent an eternity catching byte dust on his computer. The act itself was enjoyable. He knew nothing about framing, technically, or really what many of the settings did. He just took the pictures how he thought they looked good. It wasn’t an analogue for experience though as it is for many these days, the Asian tourists and the Hipsters in particular. He felt that they never actually lived life but rather made proof of a life lived. They weren’t there for any of it, personally, just their human forms. There were all the Asian tourists with their factory smiles giving the V for Victory sign with their hands in every single shot, waiting until they could get home and put it on their social networking site. The Hipsters as well just made evidence of life in order for it to be posted online, going further though into that sickly realm of irony. The ironic mustaches and poses, the ironic mimicry of Asian tourists even possibly, creating some facsimile of reality that seemed labyrinthine and inescapable."
I must say that I have done no editing and would be so very fine with anyone telling me if something sounded weird or was just outright wrong. It is very possible that both things have occurred, possibly simultaneously. Anyway, that's all I got. Plus this cartoon which identifies my situation near perfectly:
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