As I sat at my computer……
“STOP THE MUSIC!!!!!”, yelled a voice inside my head. The voice was that of Jimmy Durante, which I thought was strange, as the great Schnozola has been dead for a considerable long time.
“WAIT!!!” cried a second voice whose author was not identifiable. 
“Just wait a minute. Hold on,” continued the second voice. “Don’t all of these ‘As I sat on the bus’ things have to begin with the phrase “As I sat on the bus”? What’s this with the “As I sat at my computer”? Bumba, you are a shameless iconoclast! And it’s your own icons that you’re breaking!”
“Hold on to your horses,” I told the both of them. “First of all, it doesn’t necessarily have to open with As I sat on the bus. The bus can come in the middle or the end. Actually, in my experience the bus tends to come at the end – after a long wait. Furthermore, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the bus for the AISOTB Invitational. Any means of public mass transportation is perfectly satisfactory.”
“So,” I intoned, “I’m happy to clear up some of these misunderstandings. But please to let me continue. What I had started to say (before being so rudely interrupted) was:”
As I sat at the computer I copied down what I had written the day before on the bus. The #30 bus had come surprisingly quickly, less than a ten minute wait. The #30 with its long and weary route from downtown Little Tokyo up to West Hollywood is a hardy traveller. I think some of the # 30’s never make it all the way. They drop off; they fall by the wayside. Perhaps they stop for a cup of coffee. I think that’s why sometimes you can wait several years for the #30 to come. In any case this lonely #30 had made it, carrying just a few brave and lonely travellers. I took a seat in the back. 
I finally made it to the Beverly Hills Library. I took out some videos and three Kurt Vonnegut books. Good old Kurt had left us with a lot to read.
I walked back down from Beverly Hills – back to San Vicente Bl – to catch the #30 line. I walked on Burton Way, a street that sometimes reminds me of the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. 
Actually it doesn’t look much like the Grand Concourse at all, but I suppose I have expanded or lowered my threshholds for nostalgic moments.
Again to wait for the #30 bus.
and again I need to thank the MTA gods for their generosity in granting us writers so much opportunity to write. Not to mention time to read books, newspapers, sudokos and crossword puzzles. Ah the glorious MTA gods. Praise be the gods of the MTA…….
The voice then interrupted: “Is this going to be one of those religious, pantheistic sorts of AISOTB posts?”
“No. Don’t worry,” I responded in a soothing and reassuring voice. “Bumba is cruel. But not that cruel.”
As I interrupted myself from this rather silly internal dialogue (internal dialogue being a word lifted from the Carlos Castaneda/Don Juan books and it means exactly what it says: the internal dialogue is that conversation we so often have in our so-called minds. “Shutting the internal dialogue” becomes a command/exercise/preliminary task for a sorcorer or man of knowledge to accomplish.)
However, and to continue (internal dialogue aside), I would like to conclude this week’s AISOTB post with a song of course – which you will have to sing for yourself, because Bumba can’t do it yet. The song is “Hello I Must Be Going”, written by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby in 1930 or so and sung so splendidly by Groucho Marx (See Groucho’s entrance in the opening of Animal Crackers. Highly recommended!)
Hello, I must be going.
I cannot stay.
I came to say
I must be going
An Occasional Story or Magazine 