three short ones and a dumb not so short one

I am always so optimistic in barber’s chairs. Not like last time, I think, it won’t be like last time. And every time; too short or too much a mullet.
And at home I have skinned knuckles and a broken arm courtesy of the brick wall and the car I ricocheted into on my bike.

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What I want is endless pretty girls to write endless pretty songs about what I’m doing. Endless until I’m just so sick of hearing them I’m screaming “enough! get out! FORGET IT!”

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A woman hits a boy on a bike in her car.
He pirouettes, hits the ground and her own child in the back says is he ok? What happened?
Driving on she says it’s fine, I know him. It’s fine.

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I write the notes for this story on the back of a shopping list watching the clock I used to watch when I worked in the bar I am not working in now.
The bus I was on broke down a hundred meters away and I, tired but alert, wanting to gather everyone aboard for drinks but finding no one pretty enough, go to the place by myself.
I have come here twice since I stopped working and probably shouldn’t be remembered here but once I was, though not tonight.

I nearly hated working here. Except for the drinks I sneaked and the jokes and pretty girls it was bullshit. It worked out in equal measure of high and low.
Who doesn’t watch a clock every now and again? Maybe it is always ticking on but at every right now the fucking thing is holding me back. Just as it did when I worked here so it does again, telling me every second that I’m not on a bus going home.

Sometimes you learn to hate a certain bus. The bus I need comes one an hour and hating that clock I wait outside despite the rain and cold and the every five minutes other busses.
Each bus that comes around the bend you pray to fucking God it is the one you want. Three or four times of this, one coming every couple of minutes, you realise your bus will just never come. It breaks me and every other bus that comes is a shitball thrown hard and fast at my eye.

In the rain a homeless man talks to some woman he knows with her kid.
So I watch them promising myself she’s a good mother and tying to figure out where he has come from to get here and knowing I know nothing about life at all.
And me watching them knowing that when I get home I’m probably going to have a wank and start wondering about them and end up feeling nothing for myself at all.
The kid is all smiles but I watch the three of them guessing at what will happen to her, wanting to know so badly and feeling trapped and desperate as I just watch feeling like an asshole.

It must be written all over my face because some woman comes up to me and asks if I’m alright.
Then she asks but are you alright?

My bus pulls up and she starts screaming at the driver. Her accent is thick and I don’t understand. I just get on and go home and feel trapped by myself, in my house.