The buses stopped running today around 6pm, around the same time that they pulled the snowplows off the roads and around the same time I cut out of work early and drove home in a total whiteout. As I was driving blindly down Superior Street, tightly gripping my wheel and squinting, trying to make out the errant pedestrian or stranded car, I thought about all the bus riders out there and how they were probably even more screwed than I was.

When I was a kid, the DTA bus drove right up our street, even though it was a narrow, one-way residential street. Friends would visit, and they'd look confused when the bus went by. It never felt confusing to me. I lived a block away from Shopper's City department store. The house on the corner was actually a pet shop. Obviously, I was living in the center of the universe.

I rode the bus a lot, especially in my college years and in my 20s. One of the first pieces I ever wrote for alternative media was a series of blurbs entitled, "This Happened To Me," modeled after a comic of that name from Outdoor Life magazine. But instead of stories of encounters with grizzly bears and rattlesnakes, I wrote about encounters with bus crazies. The 80-year-old woman who told two teenagers, "You can look, boys, but you can't touch!" The guy who panhandled me by claiming that I knew him, while his friend yelled, "Oh, you KNOW him. You BEST KNOW him." The woman who told her friend about a recent knifing involving "Spanics" and her friend responding that she didn't know that the "Spanics" used knives.

I can think of only a handful of occasions when I was stranded on the busline. Once I waited in a shelter for probably two hours before finally giving up. I used up all my quarters and called every cab company in the phone book, and eventually, I spotted a cab spinning in a snowbank about three blocks away. He drove me home at about 15 miles an hour, and I tipped him about 30% which was way more than I could afford, but I was that appreciative.

Tonight I lucked out and abandoned my car only two blocks from my final destination. The short walk took my breath away, and I arrived looking like some kind of frazzled yeti. But you can bet that somewhere, someone walked four miles in this blizzard.

I feel for 'em.