One time we were burning this fire in a house and one of my buddies had brought this roman candle with him. He was gonna shoot it out the window from the couch we were sitting on. We had played with roman candles out on the islands a lot. They were weak fireworks, usually, but not this time. The first blast came out of that thing like a canon shot, and this ball of green-blue fire got caught up in the curtain, which pretty much right then just melted to the floor, catching the carpet on fire, then crawling up the walls.

When I was a boy, I rode the bus to school, too. Back then it didn't cost no dollar fifty though. It was like a quarter. And we'd ride to school, then on the way home we'd transfer and head down to the river. In the warm weather we'd swim and fish, or in the winter we'd burn stuff in the little houses on the coast guard island. We never saw no coast guards.

The teenage girl rides the bus every day. I see her all the time. Her parents are nice folks who live out in Riverside. She gets on and has her headphones up so high everyone else can hear the music. Half the time she puts her pass backwards through the card swipe and don't even notice it don't beep. I figure it ain't worth it to hassle her about it.

I got no patience for hobos, bums, crackheads, panhandlers, or generally human annoyances. I saw one time, on the bus, this group of boys roll these two crackheads who kept hasselling them for money. Eventually they pissed off these kids, and they just turned out their pockets. They threw their shitty cigarettes and their crackpipes or whatever out the window, and they might have each taken a couple licks for fun. It was a fucking strange thing to witness. I mean, I wasn't sure what to do, but there was so many of them boys. I couldn't get involved. In the end them crackheads didn't seem much worse for the wear.