(22 ramadhan 1426) serial times, pt 3

The Pkg

(continued from before...)

As I got to the corner of E. Grand and Sepulveda Boulevards, just a few blocks south of Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), bus No. 232, the one I needed, went by across the street, in the northerly direction toward which I was headed. This meant I had about a 15-minute wait before the next one would drive by to get me. I crossed the street when the light allowed me to do so and sat down to watch the traffic and imagine that I was being watched by every passing car.

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Los Angeles is not a place where people walk or take the bus too much. Public transportation isn’t good for one’s image, but I had no image to protect and was stoned, so I really didn’t care; I had other cares on that day.

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However, I knew what I must’ve looked like to some of the passersby as I walked down the street with a package in my hand. I didn’t fancy myself as not attracting attention; on the contrary, as I sat there on the bench awaiting the bus, the thought began to enshroud me that I was going to attract the wrong kind of attention. A man with a shaved head and sunglasses on a cloudy day walking in an area near LAX with a package in his hand might not go over well, especially in light of the heightened security in recent months and the paran(n)o(ying)id propaganda that had forced Congress to pass that goddamned USA PATRIOT Act—which granted law enforcement to arrest and harass anyone they deemed to be “acting suspiciously” or for suspecting that one was acting or going to act suspiciously; if I’d been born with darker skin, I’d have really been even more paranoid than I was making myself.

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Then, I began to think about what the bus driver or bus patrons might think when they saw me with this pkg in my hand. I thought that they might wonder why I was riding a bus with an opened pkg in my hand. With all the recent stories about suicide bombs in the Middle East and the ruling class-led paranoia that anyone with a pkg on a bus was intent upon blowing it up (it probably didn’t help, either, that I was, in Israel-loving LA, wearing a ‘FREE PALESTINE’ t-shirt), I was beginning to get nervous as I thought about these things. Precisely the last thing I wanted was attention and someone’s snooping around my pkg. While there certainly was nothing explosive or dangerous in the box, things were going to be explosive for me if the wrong people discovered what was in my box.

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In my mind, I raced ahead to the future and imagined my sitting on a park bench, empty-piped and sober, cursing myself for having been careless the week before in mailing my goods. Despite the fact that I’d convinced myself that I was going to be caught, I knew I had to forge ahead and do the deed. Taking the chance of getting caught and serving time for possession outweighed the sitting, knowing, and self-excoriating, a week later, that I’d be doing because I’d made a lazy attempt to send into my future the tools to unlock my mindset and enhance the colors of my hallucinations-to-be.

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It seemed like an interminable amount of time had passed since the last bus had lurched by. However, trying to gauge time while in that state, I knew, was about as effective as square tires. I figured that it’d probably been not even five minutes since I’d sat down and I laughed at my flying mind’s trying to comprehend and calculate the vagaries of time.

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(to be continued...)