The conversation at the bus stop had begun when I asked the young woman seated on a bench how far it was to Granville Street, as I intended to walk there, if it wasn't too far, meaning more than a 5 minute walk or so from the bus stop outside the hospital, where I had just finished visiting a friend in the psychiatric unit, which I explained to the woman when she asked where I was in a hurry to go, after first telling me it was at least 12 blocks to Granville Street, and after I had mentioned that I needed to catch another bus on Granville going downtown, as well as the fact that, had I known I could have caught a different bus a half-block away in the other direction that also went downtown, I would have taken that bus instead, but I hadn't realized this possibility before seeing that particular bus go by, while beginning the conversation with her by asking the approximate (walking implied) distance to Granville Street. I wasn't in a hurry to get anywhere, but would rather have walked to Granville Street than have waited an identical or longer period of time for a bus to take me there, since it was sunny but not too hot and a walk might not have been unpleasant, under these circumstances, would certainly have been less enervating than sitting on a bench waiting for a bus, had I not, as I in fact had, chosen to ask the distance to Granville Street of someone who ended up talking to me for the entire wait, a phenomenon I could not have predicted, that person being the only other person at the bus stop and someone who, surprisingly, decided to converse with me until the bus eventually came, 5 minutes after I had asked the Granville Street question, during which conversation we had somehow managed to talk about a lot more than the (walking implied) distance to Granville Street, and her as-sumption of my being in a hurry to get somewhere, an assumption that had been wrong on every level, incidentally, in the short term and in the long term, I found myself thinking, rather surprisingly, having suddenly realized, upon being accused of being in a hurry, that I was not the type of person, or whatever the phrase is, to ever see myself as primarily or secondarily being in a hurry to get any-where, just as, when people asked me, as they often did, if I had gone out of my way for this or that reason or person, I couldn't think of what my way could possibly be, if my way was not where I actu-ally was.
Suspiciously, only snippets of the conversation came back to me later, disconnected pieces of it, though it was, at the time it occurred, I remembered, an unusually coherent and fluid exchange, one of the least disjunctive and uncomfortable I could remember, moving from phrase to phrase almost ef-fortlessly, or perhaps with great effort that came so naturally it felt quite effortless, moving from per-son (her) to person (me) and back (her) also effortlessly, no stammering or interrupting of each other, as I, for example, described my recent lapse from vegetarianism, the act of eating two hamburgers on my way to the hospital, with a nonchalance that would certainly have seemed suspicious to the woman had I not explained, at the time, perhaps because I knew the nonchalance of my description could be construed as suspicious, that I had become vegetarian two years earlier not out of spiritual or political or personal health, or whatever the terms are, considerations, as her expression indicated to me she might suspect, but because I had had a dream in which I had had to eat a four foot high pile of raw hamburger, and this had turned my stomach against meat in general, but nonetheless, I must assume that, every once in a while, I will still have an urge to eat meat, I had explained, as I had just had. I didn't always have to listen to my dreams, I said in response to her question, rather, this par-ticular dream had been an univocal sign which, though expressed as a dream, was as incontrovertible as anything else I had ever seen, or could ever see, and in the near brutality or brutality of its impres-sion had, so to speak, as they say, forced me to the decision to stop eating animal parts by its appar-ent insistence on turning my stomach whenever I remembered it, a thing, obviously, most likely to oc-cur when I was actually faced with the possibility of eating some animal part, though not exclusively at those times, and obviously not every time I thought about eating animals or animal parts, as my lapse had just proven, not saying this last part to her but hoping it would be understood by implica-tion. Taking it to its conclusion, a thing I often considered the bare minimum and which I was just as often incapable of doing, or even imagining, fanatical concern with one's own health, and more so fa-natical concern with one's so-called spiritual well-being, or whatever the term is, particularly where one concerned oneself with such oracular mischievousness as karma and soul and afterlife and rein-carnation, was simply egotism, or worse, narcissism, raised to such incredible heights that it would be laughable, if it weren't so terrifyingly teratogenic, the belief that, if one practiced the ultimate egotism, or narcissism, one would achieve ultimate spirituality, that all one had to do was fret over one's soul for an entire lifetime to obtain a certificate, or some such, of some sort of spiritual graduation, freeing one, presumably, from the process one will have spent an existence accomplishing, from the process one will have spent an existence fretting over, translating one into some conjectured purity from con-jectured impurity, translating one into a higher state, or some such, of being, or non-being, or supra-being, less travailed by questionable concerns the so-called rest of so-called humanity is, the practi-tioners of such mischievousness apparently believe, wholly taken up with, concerns bodily and imme-diate, it seemed to me, when the woman had mentioned having some friends who were Seventh Day Adventists.
I was no longer a Marxist, or a Marxist-Leninist, as I had once been, for any number of reasons, none of which had anything to do with any implied criticism of the Marxist analysis of the degener-acy, the self-consumption of capitalism, but rather had to do with Marxists and their decrepit arro-gance, their penchant for inane prophesizing, and any residual religious impulse, or spasmodic regur-gitation of religious force-feeding and torture, had dried up decades before, in the aftermath of self-consciousness that had arrived whole one afternoon in my twelfth year, in the basement of the house in which I had grown up, an evanescence that had led me to believe, in later years, that religion was essentially a childish, unselfconscious and more or less autistic phenomenon, a characteristic of those who hadn't, I rather arrogantly thought, hadn't grown up yet, for those who fell over and over again for the kinds of beliefs codified in every religion in the world, those negative, self-centered theses of greed and morality that water the root of every human horror and atrocity ever perpetrated on this planet, religions whose only function ever has been to, on one hand, placate and control and silence and humiliate people, and on the other to goad them into horrible extravagances and vengeance and murder, to coerce people to accept totally unacceptable things and convince them to be advocates of the impossible and unacceptable, religions that epitomize willful blindness and self-indulgent (or whatever) decadence as much as any of the iniquities these codes of servility claim are illustrative of evil or wrong or littleness, or whatever the term is, and as for excessive concern over one's personal health, in a world as toxic and hopeless as the world had become, in this dump, it had always been to me, at least since childhood, an unhealthy thing, making victims of those who ascribed to its tenets, or any portion of its vast array of tenets, coercing them to be not only willing but enthusiastic partici-pants in every new and dangerous, ridiculous and useless, and expensive, fad, until they ended up being overfilled buckets of gullibility bent on early destruction through the practice of every half-baked or just diabolical idea, formula, prescription, diet or attitudinal guideline, the epitome of all that could be distortedly and disgustingly self-righteous, an arid and single-mindedly self-centered degeneracy, a passion no less dangerous than any of the other myriad forms of fanaticism running rampant over the world, abetted by and abetting the increasing fascism of all the criminal govern-ments of the world.
Since she had had a Marxist professor, she said she knew that positions of extremity, though they might be interesting, might be challenging, as I felt they were, though it was of course not impossible that much that was useful could be found in such extreme positions, provided one could separate out the apparent so-called positive, or seemingly positive, elements of the extreme positions, something necessary and probably impossible at the same time, were not very practical, with which I agreed, though I did not explain that I felt, when one was discussing or fretting over the practicality, the theo-retical, no doubt, practicality of an idea or theory, one was always on unsure footing, always sur-rounded by the quagmire of utility and the quagmire of definition, quagmires of little import in them-selves but extremely important if and when one were to attempt to build, in all cases unavoidably and foolishly, operating systems or actual structures using such theories as a basis. It was too late to sug-gest this to her anyway, the bus having arrived, quite full, and we lost each other in the crowd, as they say, releasing us from any concerns about whether or not we should continue the conversation, which would probably have struck anyone who overheard it or part of it as hilarious or impossible, or both, for 10 stops, the distance to Granville Street, though, as I was standing by the rear doors wait-ing for the bus to stop, she caught my eye and asked something so quietly I had to ask her to repeat it, making her appear just a little uncomfortable there in the midst of a crowd of sweaty people, the only black person on the bus, forced to ask again if I was finished, the reiteration convincing me that I had heard quite clearly the first time she had asked but had not understood the question, or had not quite believed it, or believed I had heard it, to which I replied, interpreting the question as if she were ask-ing me if I was finished riding this particular bus, unsure as I was aware of being about the correct interpretation, that yes, I was finished, and got off.