pogoism

I’d actually forgotten about this, seeing as it happened a while back, but a few weeks ago I was on the Greyhound coming back from San Francisco to Reno.

The bus stopped in Truckee, CA, which it doesn’t normally do, and a disheveled looking woman boards. Despite there being loads of other free seats, she comes and sits next to me.

I did my best to ignore her, shoved my iPod earphones in and glared out of the window, but she insisted on talking to me.

It all started off pleasantly enough, she picked up on my accent and we talked for a bit about Europe. Then I made the foolish mistake of asking her why she got on at Truckee, something people rarely do.

Here was her story.

She was on the Amtrak train (a fairly useless service that runs once a day from Emeryville to Chicago). She had started in Emeryville, just across the bay from San Francisco. Just before Truckee, apparently, is a rather long tunnel. While she was in this tunnel she claimed that she could smell rotting flesh. The poor lady had managed to convince herself that the government was killing illegal aliens by giving them AIDS, waiting for them to die, and then transporting their bodies to the middle of the desert to bury them, so that no-one would notice.

Ridiculous.

I nodded a long, put in a few, well-placed “mmhmms” and wished to myself that she’d shut up.

Seriously, how could anyone believe that?! And AIDS of all things. It takes years to kill someone with AIDS. Ugh, so many holes in this stupid theory.

Anyway, yes, the Greyhound. So many stories.