So those are my bus stories so far. Not worth much. Mayhap Thursday, my departure date, was more interesting. I woke up Thursday afternoon, knowing that I had a great deal to do, and made the mistake of logging on to Yahoo! Messenger. I had to quickly extricate from well-wishers. Of course, Donna, I wanted you to wish me well, I was simply too busy for everyone else. Anyway, I logged out, called the people I needed to call, packed the shit I needed to pack, and proceeded to try to shoot an intro for my "movie." This went badly. I wrote down notes for what I wanted to say, aimed my camera at the chair in which I wanted to sit, and asked my uncle to sit in it. I zoomed and focused on him as best I could, then started the camera and took his place. It didn't work; the shot was lined up terribly. It seems I really needed someone behind the camera.

So I packed up the camera and tripod, and found that I didn't quite have time to paint my nails. This left me with some time to kill, but all I managed to do with said time was get increasingly nervous. So I downed the two beers still lurking in the fridge. This action rendered me no less nervous, and nauseous as well. There was only one solution for this unwanted time; I would have to find some weed.

Now, the traveling plan was to drive to my parents', leave my car with them, and have my father take me to the bus station. This meant my stoned ass would have to make it to my parents' alive. This was further complicated by the fact that I also needed to visit Pablo, to drop a few books off before I left. Fortunately, my friend Joe lives quite close to Pablo, who only lives about five miles from my parents. So I called Joe and asked if he had the hook-up. He did, and was quite willing to share a bowl and see me on my way. I drove to his pad, and we chatted and smoked for a while, but my over-excited mind prevented me from staying at one place for terribly long. So I extricated myself quickly, promising to buy him a river of booze when I returned. I then headed over to Pablo's, gave him his books, and got irrevocably sucked into an unedited, commercial-free version of Trading Places that was airing on some premium cable channel or another. This put me in an excruciating position, for I was to meet my parents at ten o'clock, the exact time Trading Places was to end! So there I was, enthralled by Jamie Lee Curtis' tits, enchanted by the sight of Dan Ackroyd in blackface, and once again surprised by Belushi's cameo, yet just as Eddie Murphy was doing his Deep Throat impersonation, I was forced to rip myself away from the greed-saturated comedy classic and try to drive five miles stoned! Oh god of television, how can you be so cruel??

Anyhoo, I made it to my parents' house safely, where we discovered that I had never been to the Atlanta Greyhound station, and dad hadn't been there in thirty years, which is to say, he hadn't been there since it had moved. OK, so we're white-bread suburbanites, sue us. So my mom was trying to call the Greyhound customer service number, which was a lost cause. So I tell my dad, let's try if we can find directions on the Greyhound Web site.

Now, my dad is not computer-illiterate. I certainly deal with computer-illiterate people, and have an unreasonably difficult time helping them, but my dad is simply not one of those people. I've seen him install Windows, a CD-ROM drive, etc.

So we go to the Greyhound web site, and I note that to get info on the Atlanta station, we can pull up an Atlanta itinerary. And I say that as long as we're doing this, would he please print out a copy of my itinerary, since I left my copy at home. So we pull up a copy of my itinerary, and he goes to get a sheet of paper for the inkjet printer.

He feeds paper into the inkjet, sits at the computer screen, and stares at it. After about a minute of watching him watch the screen, I say, "Dad?"

"Yeah?"

"Could we print that out now please? We're kind of in a hurry."

"Sure."

He stared at the computer screen for a while longer.

"Dad, do you need help printing that out?"

"No, the print button is right here," he said. And indeed it was, annoyingly huge at the top of the screen. He was now finally reaching for it, and seemed to be moving incredibly slowly, but that could have just been stoner time.