The Bus Driver Who Thought He Was On A Bicycle

I've seen a lot of things from the seat of my bicycle. This is the beauty of cycling: seeing and hearing, and being out in the open. It makes people who are not out in the open, who are not seeing and hearing (anything except their own noise and pollution), extremely jealous. This is the real reason why car drivers and their ilk get irritated at cyclists. Because they realise if only subconsciously, in the face of the freedom a cyclist demonstrates, that they are slaves to a filth and unfreedom that puts them in a gas chamber that then carries them across the now paved and vivisectioned land. They also realise, car-drivers, confronted by the fluency of the cyclist, that they are slaves to stopping (and thus stupidity) and the dreaded red light. This is because they have divested their selves of their heart and body, and allowed a pollutant to stretcher it as if it were dead. And of course when you welcome the attributes of death into your bodymind you welcome death itself. Which is why they have to follow the rules so strictly. Because they are not really alive (awake or aware), and this lack of aliveness confers a blindness upon the bodymind. Which is why they have to stop all the time: to get their bearings like a blind person. And this annoys them. So much so that in certain cases, like the McGill's 21 bus to Erskine the other day, the driver decides to take off when the light is still red, simply to prevent me (whom he has caught sight of in his rear view mirror) from overtaking his stationary vehicle and propping myself, as the cycle stencil at the traffic lights indicates, at the head of the queue. This is a dangerous thing to do when you're on a main road in an articulated bus with passengers in your care. You are not a bicycle with all the sensory openness and lack of baggage that cycling entails. But maybe, this bus driver has spent too long in his toxic cockpit, abandoning his heart to a filthy machine, slowly falling asleep cognitively as well as physically and spiritually. All the more reason perhaps to dream of being a bicycle.