Welcome To The Bus Show

Sometimes when sitting at the bench of the North Lamar Transfer Center one detects an odor too familiar out of its own context.

It's piss.

Usually you only smell it in your own bathroom before flushing, a public restroom that needs a cleaning, or when you go to visit your grandparents at the home.

But you don't really expect it sitting in a crowded public open-air space, such as the bus stop.

The first time I noticed it, it was raining. I hypothesized that certainly no one just whipped it out and peed right there at the bus stop at 8 p.m. on a crowded Friday evening. Surely, the falling rain had just unlocked the odor from the previously sun-dried pavement. The urine days, possibly even weeks, old, deposited there at the bus stop at some odd hour of the early a.m., most likely between the hours of 2 and 4.

But about a week later, the sun was shining bright as I sat on the bench eating my miracle tuna. Pissstench was heavy in the air.

I looked around and saw puddles in each corner of the shelter walls.

Yes, people piss at the bus stop in broad daylight, with other people around.

Like, gross.