A 30-ish black woman was riding the bus, and all I saw was a black woman riding the bus. Ordinary scene, ordinary woman, ordinary everything. Gave it no additional thought, as I looked out the window, watching a young kid on a skateboard, wishing I could skate, wondering if it’s too late to learn.

A black man came forward from the back of the bus, and said “Excuse me” to the woman. He looked every bit as ordinary as she, and she ignored him, probably assuming he was just trying to make time.

Maybe he wasn’t, though, because his second line was, “You are Kenyan,” stated as a fact, not a question. It came with an accent, presumably Kenyan.

“Yes,” she said, with what sounded like the same accent.

“I am also Kenyan,” he said, and then their conversation switched to a language unknown to me. Wild guess? Kenyan.

She lit up, and for the next ten blocks they talked like old neighbors, which I guess they were. They both enjoyed the chance to speak their native language, until eventually the man rang the bell and stepped off the bus, saying, “Goodbye, and welcome to America,” in English (obviously). She continued smiling for another few blocks.

Race is weird, ain’t it? An Asian acquaintance once told me that he could tell what country another Asian person was from — Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, etc — by the structure of their face, but whatever he could see, I couldn’t. I can certainly tell the difference between individual faces, but have no idea what makes a random Chinese face distinguishable from a random Korean face.

And I guess it’s the same with Africans, if two Kenyan strangers can recognize each other as Kenyans. Hell, I’m white, but there’s no way I could tell a Scotsman from an Irishman from an Australian, unless one of them’s wearing a kilt or waving a flag.

♦ ♦ ♦

The fat, balding guy sitting toward the back of the bus? Yeah, it was me.

Diagonally opposite, an East Asian woman sat with her daughter, about four years old. Little kids on the bus can be unpleasant, squawking and screaming and singing and throwing toys or whatever, but this kid had been properly trained and was hardly any bother at all.

The mom rang the bell, the bus pulled into a stop, the doors opened, and mom & kid got off. As the door closed, I noticed a pink hat with ears, on the seat they’d just left. Probably would’ve done this if the kid had been loud, but she’d been quiet so what the hell, I grabbed her hat, and shouted to the driver as he let the brake off, “Could you open the doors again please?”

I was too far away to hear whether the driver sighed or muttered, but he stopped the bus again, and opened the doors. I didn’t get off, but hollered, “Hey lady!” She was the only lady there and only a few feet away, so she stopped and turned and looked at me, and I leaned out the door, holding a stanchion in one hand and the kid’s beanie in the other. She took the hat, and smiled and nodded but didn’t say thank you, possibly because she didn’t speak English. On the bus, she’d been talking Pakistani or whatever to the kid.

Then I shouted “Thanks!” to the driver, sat down again, and we rolled away.

Please note, I don’t like telling stories where I’m the good guy. It’s bad for my image. In this story, the good guy is the bus driver, for stopping and re-opening the doors, even though he’d already stopped and opened the doors. Some drivers won’t do that a second time.

♦ ♦ ♦

A youngish white man was riding the bus, in a ponytail and stripped Aztec-style shirt. He was talking zen nonsense to strangers who didn’t seem interested, and he said something about crystals and his chakra, and I rolled my eyes and wished I could shut off my ears. He babbled on with a few more blocks of zen talk, and then said, “That’s why I work at Safeway. My way is safe, and I hope yours is, too.”

It was too stupid to be tolerated, so I spoke up from two rows behind on the bus: “Is that really *why you work at Safeway? Not for the paycheck, but just so you can have that pithy line?”

The zenny guy looked at me for a long moment, and then forgot the zen and said, “What is your fuckin’ problem?”

I shook my head but said nothing more, simply turned and looked out the window.

♦ ♦ ♦

A different day, on a different bus, I was in a front-facing seat, just behind a woman wearing cut-offs with her legs up, in a sideways seat. She was half a century too young for a man of my age, but did I mention, legs up in a sideways seat.

Spent half my ride side-eyeing her legs, wondering how high they went, and half my ride looking at a man in a sideways seat in front of me, facing the leggy woman. He had a better view of her, but was being less discreet about it. When she rang the bell, she glared at him but not at me (discretion is the better part of valor). She stepped off the bus, and that man’s eyes followed her until the bus pulled ’round a corner.

Me, I’d seen enough of the legs, so I just watched the watcher watching, and wondered why he had to be so brazen about it. Do the math, man. If you make a lady wearing cut-offs feel self-conscious or endangered, she’s less likely to wear cut-offs next time. Why would you do that?

Should’ve said that to the dude, but he had muscles.

6/12/2026

Transit Takes

itsdougholland.com
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The take-out bowl with yesterday’s leftover veggies and noodles looked microwave-able, so I set the timer to six minutes on low power, and thought it would be breakfast. Instead it was just a mess.

The plastic container melted, and when the microwave dinged and I opened its door, noodles and cabbage cascaded onto the threadbare carpet. Most of it I cleaned up, and the roaches will clean up the rest, and I had Top Ramen for breakfast — the beginning of a disappointing, frustrating day.

Deprive a man of the breakfast he wants, and he might get grumpy. I was that man.

There weren’t many seats on BART, so I was in one of the ‘booths’, where two benches face each other. Some yuppiefuck and his overdressed wife were sitting opposite me, annoying me, not in any particular way but merely by existing.

In downtown Oakland, they got up and got off the train, and I hoped for an empty booth the rest of the ride. It wasn’t five seconds, though, before a 35-ish father and his 5-ish son sat down. The kid was just friendly enough to be a bother, waving at me, putting his hands over his eyes so nobody could see him. When he peeked out, I made a face at him and the kid giggled and said, “You’re funny.”

And that’s when I noticed he was wearing a badge. It was made of tin or plastic, a star with five points, with block lettering that said, “JUNIOR POLICE OFFICER.”

And of course, kids play cops and robbers and whatnot, and it’s harmless, probably, but I don’t like cops and the badge bugged me.

“Oooh,” I cooed, “are you a junior police officer?”

“Yup,” he said proudly, and his dad smiled at me. His dad was wearing glasses and looked kinda wimpy, which definitely factored into what I said next.

“Are you on the lookout for junior poor people you can hassle, and junior black people you can beat up and kill?” Father & son both lost their smiles, the dad yelled something at me, and in mere seconds they’d walked all the way to the other end of the train, and I had a booth to myself for the rest of my ride to Berkeley.

♦ ♦ ♦  

Telegraph Ave is usually a jumble of cars, pedestrians, street vendors and street people. Because there’s a crowd, Christians often preach and sing at the corner. Today there were eight adults, with three little kid, and I tell you, when the Christians start talking about Heaven it’s hell on earth.

They’re on the Ave about once a month, often both Saturday and Sunday of the same weekend, but it’s only been two weekends since their last missionary visit, so there were genuine groans from Brenda to my left, and Umberto to my right, and me (of course) when the Jesus People started setting up their mikes this morning.

As I’ve written before, it’s their microphones and amplifiers that infuriate me, more than their silly message. Over loudspeakers onto a public square to an audience that doesn’t want to hear it, there’s no escape, so the Lord was pounded into our eardrums non-stop, beginning at 11AM.

We work on the Ave so we had to be there, but the pedestrians —potential customers — are free to leave, and they always do. When the Lord-lovers click their microphones on, the crowd thins by about a third. Who wants to shop and stroll on Telegraph when it sounds like Sunday in church? So in addition to annoying the fuck outta me, the preachers are bad for business.

Already in a bad mood, I fumed as the first sermon of silly platitudes faded into the second, and then they started singing the same godawful godsongs they’d sung last time and the time before and the time before that. Then they started their stale stories about how, once, they’d been interesting people, until they found Jeeezus. And then they sang again.

I don’t have a God, but — My God! The songs and preaching brought clouds on a sunny day, and something had to be done about it, but what?

In past months, I’ve shouted in the Christians’ faces, taunted their preachers from across the street, insulted the imbeciles who hand out their flyers… Short of violence (which certainly has its appeal), there’s only one tactic I hadn’t tried — a rational, reasonable conversation with one of them.

Is that even possible, I wondered? Would any of the sanctimonians be capable of an intelligent dialogue? For that matter, would I be capable of it, without devolving into screaming at them?

It’s not possible to convince Christians that their silly god doesn’t exist, but that wasn’t what I wanted to try. I only wanted to see if I could calmly, politely, rationally convince them to turn down the volume on their amplifiers. And that, I decided, would be my challenge for the day.

Yessir, I was going to engage with the Christians, reasonably. No shouting. No insults. No profanity. “I’m gonna step away for a moment,” I said to Brenda. “Could you keep an eye on my table, please?”

She nodded, and knows me well enough that she knew something was up.

At the corner, two men were handing out save-your-soul tracts. I walked past them and approached the band, which was crucifying another pop song, making it into an awful hymn.

The singer was a white man in his twenties who couldn’t sing, so I approached him, and in my most calm, polite, conversational voice I said, “Don’t you think it’s rude to sing over a PA system, to people who don’t want to hear it?”

I hadn’t really noticed the microphone between us, but Brenda told me later that my question came through the speakers louder than the song.

The singer eyed me nervously but kept on singing “Read It,” their Christianized version of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” now about the joys of reading
the Bible.

A short, thin man stepped between me and the singer, and a second man stepped up next to the short guy, holding a stack of flyers and smiling at me enormously. Both men were talking to me at the same time, the small one in a snarly, angry tone telling me to get off the stage, but there was no stage, only a plot of asphalt they’d claimed and taken over.

The smiley guy was quoting the Beatitudes, and seemed more ‘Christlike’, so he’s the one I aimed my experiment at. Gonna stay calm and cool, and have a conversation with this man:

“Don’t you think this is rude?” I asked him, sweeping my hand toward the singer and the band.

“You, speaking into our microphone?” the smiling man said, smiling. “Yes, that is rude. Why don’t we step to the side, and talk about it.”

His voice was smooth as pudding, his smile seemingly permanent. God, this guy was slick.

And maybe he had a point, too. I hate their microphone and didn’t mean to be talking into it, so I followed him a few feet down the sidewalk, until he stopped, smiled even bigger than before, and asked if I’d heard about Jesus.

“Oh, yes,” I answered, still politely and in my softest voice. “I’ve heard about Jesus all my life, but that’s not what I wanted to talk about. I’d like to know if you’ve heard about manners.” And I smiled, almost as big as his smile, which slightly deflated.

“I’m sure I don’t understand,” he said, which struck me as an oddly dishonest choice of words. How could he not understand? Ah, but patience, Doug, patience.

“By ‘manners’, I mean that it’s rude to blast your sermons and songs through microphones and loudspeakers, at people who don’t want to hear it.”

“We have a permit from the City of Berkeley,” he said, and flashed his high-beam smile again.

“A permit makes it legal, but doesn’t make it less rude.”

“If you don’t like our message, perhaps you should complain to the City Council,” he said. Had his smile lost a few megawatts?

“No,” I answered, and even added a friendly, folksy chuckle, “I’m not complaining about your message, only your volume.”

He smiled bigger, but sorta folded his forehead like, huh?

“Say anything you like, free speech is cool — but when you say it through mikes and loudspeakers, that’s simply bad manners.”

“We’re trying to save people’s immortal souls,” he said sorta paternalistically, “and I hardly think that’s bad manners.”

With another horrible hymn being sung in the background, I looked at this smiley guy and knew he’d be, quite literally, a tough nut to crack. “Try this,” I said. “What if someone set up amplifiers and loudspeakers in front of your home, and talked and sang all day, so you couldn’t think, couldn’t relax, couldn’t have a moment’s peace and quiet.”

“Oh, that’s not the same at all,” he said, shaking his smiling head. “There are no homes here. This is a business district.” He smiled all over again, and raised an eyebrow at me. Touché. 

Frustrated, I sighed. There are some apartments above the shops, but this isn’t really a residential area, so the fucker was right, and almost involuntarily, I smiled back at him. “Well, what if someone set up loudspeakers outside your church, so you couldn’t hear yourself pray.”

“God could still hear me pray,” he said, “but I guess I’d ask if they had a permit from the city.” Dude seemed awfully proud of his permit.

“No, you wouldn’t. Come on. At the very least, you’d go up to them and ask ’em to turn the amplifier off, or down, and that’s all I’m asking, politely, please—”

His smile had turned into a chuckle, so I interrupted myself to say, “It’s not funny.” He nodded, and his chuckles stopped. Was I getting through to him?

Next I said, “Perhaps you don’t know how disastrously your street preaching effects business for all of us—”

“Ah, you’re one of the street vendors?”

“Yes.”

“And what do you sell?”

Oh, no no no. Maybe he knew what I sell, or maybe he was only trying to steer the conversation, but for obvious reasons I didn’t want to go there at all.

“That’s not relevant,” I said. “What’s relevant, sir” — still keeping it polite — “is that your loudspeakers drive people away from Telegraph.” That seemed to be sinking into him, so I added: “And it drives people away from your message, too. I don’t think Jesus would use a microphone and loudspeaker.”

That last line, recycled from a rant written for last month’s zine, was supposed to stop him cold, make him think, but instead he said, ever smiling, “Oh, yes He would. Jesus would use all the modern technologies — microphones, television, radio, even the internet. I’m sure He’d have a website.”

I was tired of looking at this man’s teeth, tired of his sidestepping my point, but determined to remain as congenial as he was. I would not raise my voice, would not use naughty language. My argument was for manners, so my own manners needed to be impeccable.

The singer behind me had begun mangling yet another tune, though, and I couldn’t think of anything intelligent to say, which gave the schmuck an opening.

“Maybe you should apply for a permit,” he said, which confused me. I thought he was talking about a vendor’s permit, but he was talking again about his group’s permit to preach on the sidewalk. “Maybe you’d do better sales if you had a microphone, too.”

What a stupid argument, I thought, but didn’t say. “A hundred vendors on Telegraph, all of us barking into microphones — that would be unbearable. All the customers would vanish, the street would be empty, and you and I wouldn’t be here, having this conversation—”

“But we are here, friend,” he said, smiling and waving a Christian tract toward me, as if I’d take it.

“Hey, hey,” I said, just a little too loudly, nudging his hand away and blocking his other hand, which he’d reached out to wrap around my shoulder. “Are we having a conversation, or just talking at each other?” My voice was inching up, and I made a conscious but difficult effort to speak more quietly. “All of this is rude, sir — singing hymns at ninety decibels, and then trying to give me a pamphlet, when Jesus is not what I came over to talk about.”

“Well then, what do you want to talk about?” Oh, Lord, the man’s godly grin, his fluorescent teeth — I wanted to knock a few of them out.

“As I’ve said,” I said again, “everything you’re doing out here is rude. Even ruder,” and this was tricky, but I said it soft and even semi-smiling, “you smile like a saint, but you haven’t heard a word I’ve said.”

“I’ve heard, friend,” he answered. “You think it’s impolite that we try to save people from eternal hellfire. I think it would be awfully rude if we didn’t,” and again he used that paternalistic tone of voice, like he’s the teacher and I’m the child. I gritted my teeth painfully hard, wondering whether to continue or concede defeat. Civil chit-chat with this Christian was getting nowhere.

“After all,” he continued, “Jesus died for you. The least you can do is listen to His message.”

“No, that’s not the least I can do. I can do less. And while we’re on the topic, dying was a trivial sacrifice for your Jesus. It meant nothing, because he knew he’d be coming back from the dead, right? If resurrection is part of the deal, hell, I’d die even for a worthless loser like you.” And yeah, my voice had gone up, I’d lost my cool, and the experiment was a failure.

“Hey,” he smiled again, but sadly this time, “who’s being rude now?”

“Me. It’s my turn.” Flashing both my middle fingers, I walked back to my table, where I’d been absent for ten minutes. And there I simmered all afternoon, while the Christians preached and sang. Umberto and I shouted occasional insults at them, but the amplified droning of religion went on and on and on… 

♦ ♦ ♦  

To some extent, being a Christian requires people to switch their minds off, but that doesn’t mean Christians are stupid. That guy was no dummy. He’d had an answer for everything I said, and he beat me fair and square. You win, smiley guy — there really is no talking sense into a Christian.

“It’s so sad,” that same smiley man said into the microphone when it was his turn to preach, “that people wonder why mankind was created. Why are we here? Well, I know why. Yes, I have the answer to the eternal question.” Long, dramatic pause…

“We were created to praise God! That is our purpose, and isn’t it wonderful!”

Umberto nudged me and said, “Sounds like God has an almost-human lack of self-esteem.”

“All we have to do,” the smiling preacher continued, “is live our lives by the principles of the Bible!”

“My life is built on the principles of Jack Benny’s biography,” said Brenda.

And I laughed, but had no jokes of my own. It was hot, the Christians were relentless, and I’d lost my temper when not losing my temper was my goal.

♦ ♦ ♦  

Eventually but way too late, the Christians finished their screeching and preaching, unplugged their speakers, closed their Bibles, and packed their equipment into a creepy-looking white van that needed to be washed.

Most of them rode away, but there wasn’t room for all of them, so the smiley Christian and his wife stayed behind — and they walked up to my table!This was gonna be it, I thought. What with me and Smiley and all the blasphemous fish at my table, this would be a conflagration to begin the End Times. My frustration had been building ever since I’d double-flipped him off, but this time I wasn’t going to try to be polite.

Apparently, though, I’d made so little impression on the smiley guy that he didn’t even recognize me. And he had no curiosity about the fish. He’d only stopped at my table to ask innocently, “Could you tell us which way is the subway station?”

Before I could think of a retort vicious enough, Umberto answered, “It’s down. Go straight to hell and you’ll find it on the way.”

“I know you know,” said Mrs Smiley, “that Christ died for your sins.”

“Well, what a patsy,” Brenda said. “I live for my sins.”

And it occurred to me that I have a few friends here, but alongside that heartwarming thought, they were getting all the good zingers. All I could think was that the smiling Christian’s face must’ve hurt from wearing that big, phony smile the whole damned day. And he smiled again, and his wife flashed exactly the same smile, a matched set that seemed so zombielike I got goose bumps.

“We’ll pray for you,” Smiley said, which is “Fuck you” in the Christian language, and they walked away.

After they’d taken several steps, I suddenly knew my line, and called out, “Hey, wait a minute.” They turned around, and I said, “Your God can part the Red Sea, raise the dead — but He can’t lead you to a BART station?”

The smiling Christian smiled, and started saying something like, “It doesn’t work that way, friend.” He and his wife blessed us with a few more platitudes, then walked down the Avenue, not toward the subway station but away from it.

Modern buses have wheelchair ramps, but unlike the ramp at a the post office or any building anywhere, bus ramps can’t simply sit there waiting for a wheelchair. Bus ramps need to fold up, out of the way.

On most buses, a buzzer sounds when the wheelchair ramp is being unfolded or refolded, to keep able-bodied but feeble-minded people from walking on the ramp while it’s moving. On older buses, there’s no buzzer, because hello, the ramp is visibly moving and audibly obvious. The mechanism is loud.

On some of the newer buses, they’ve gone beyond the buzzer, with a recorded announcement that warns four times, “Caution. The ramp is being deployed,” as the ramp begins unfolding. It’s an AI female voice, and it repeats those words four more times, while the ramp goes down.

It’s too loud, so there’s no escaping the announcement, either on the sidewalk or over the in-bus public address. Four piercing, emotionless recitations of “Caution. The ramp is being deployed,” then somebody in a wheelchair rolls on or off the bus, and then the announcement repeats four times more as the ramp is being refolded into the floor.

On this day, though, after the wheelchair passenger had come aboard, after the ramp had been refolded into the bus’s floor, as the driver emerged from behind his steering wheel to attach the safety chains that secure the wheelchair to floor, the voice said again, “Caution. The ramp is being deployed.” I’d been counting the eight announcements, so I knew something was wrong when it said it a ninth time. And then a tenth, and eleventh.

The driver muttered something I couldn’t quite hear, finished securing the passenger, then came back to her seat and pressed a button, trying to shut up the voice. But the voice wouldn’t shut up. The ramp was no longer being deployed, but every five seconds the voice was still saying, “Caution. The ramp is being deployed.”

After pushing twenty buttons or the same button twenty times, the driver lowered the wheelchair ramp again, this time for nobody, then raised it again, but the voice wouldn’t stop saying, “Caution. The ramp is being deployed.” The driver tried lowering and raising the ramp a third time, but still, the fake voice wouldn’t stop saying, “Caution. The ramp is being deployed.”

Everything else seemed to be working, so the bus could’ve simply continued on its route, always announcing, “Caution. The ramp is being deployed.” I might’ve enjoyed that — block after block, mile after mile of “Caution. The ramp is being deployed.”

Instead the driver radioed for a tow, and took the bus out of service. “Everybody off the bus, please,” she said, and the bus replied, “Caution. The ramp is being deployed.”

The driver unfastened the chains and lowered the ramp, letting the wheelchair passenger off, as the voice said over and over again, “Caution. The ramp is being deployed,” even after the ramp had been folded into the floor a fourth time.

Then twenty of us waited about twenty minutes for the next bus to arrive, and twelve times per minute, we heard “Caution. The ramp is being deployed.” Fifty or so times we’d heard it while we were on the bus, and another eighty or so times we heard it while waiting for the next bus. That’s a lot of “Caution. The ramp is being deployed.”

When the next bus came, we all stepped aboard, except the wheelchair passenger, who rolled aboard. The driver lowered the wheelchair ramp, which revealed this to be a bus that only buzzed its wheelchair warning, “buzzzz, buzzz, buzzz,” instead of saying, “Caution. The ramp is being deployed,” and that was a relief.

When we rolled away, it was half a block before the sound of “Caution. The ramp is being deployed,” faded into the distance.

All things considered, I prefer the buses that don’t talk.

♦ ♦ ♦

Riding the bus, I’m usually quiet, adrift in my thoughts or looking at the legs on some dame in the sideways seats.

Waiting for the bus, though, if there are other people waiting with me, I’m an actor, playing a character I call Slightly Peculiar. He talks nonsense to himself, or picks my nose, or sings a song intentionally off-key.

It’s a strategy, to keep panhandlers away, and prevent people from talking to me. Strangers might talk to Doug, but I prefer they don’t, and almost nobody talks to Slightly Peculiar.

So there I was, waiting at a busy bus stop with half a dozen other people, and giving them a brilliant performance of my Slightly Peculiar character.

A readerboard listed the next arrivals, but it’s often wrong — when it says a bus is coming in three minutes, it’ll more likely be six, and when it says six minutes the bus will arrive in three. At the moment, the sign said a bus was arriving now, but there was no bus in sight, so I said most of the above, and ended with, “The bus is here now, eh? Must be an invisible bus.” (Tip your waiter; I’ll be here all week…)

One of the other people waiting for the bus was a muscular black man with a face on the verge of angry, and to me he said, “Who the hell are you talking to?” If my character was Slightly Peculiar, his was Tough Guy Itching For A Fight.

I am not itching for a fight, but I stayed in character and said, “Myself,” pointing at my chest. “I talk to myself a lot. The sign says ‘now’, but the bus is nowhere near.”

The guy looked fierce for another several seconds, as I counted his muscles and tattoos (lots), but finally he rolled his eyes and looked away, and yessir, I was relieved.

Four minutes later the sign still said the bus was arriving ‘now’, but now there was a bus, so I happily announced, “Now is now!” and the tough black guy glowered at me again. We boarded, him at the front door, me at the back, and sat far, far apart.

One day I might misjudge what to say to which random psychotic at the bus stop, and that’ll be the day I die. This wasn’t that day, but I believe those few minutes at that bus stop were the most danger I’ve been in since intentionally walking in front of a moving #560 bus a few weeks ago.

Which might be a story worth telling, but it’s a long one and I’m not in the mood for a long story right now.

6/11/2026

Transit Takes

itsdougholland.com
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