Riding home on the bus is like… well… I can’t compare it to anything at the moment. It’s just something that needs to be experienced on a regular basis — repeatedly for months and months and months without end — to be fully appreciated. As such — as it is such an obscenely disturbing lifestyle that I can’t even find an analogy — I tend to find ways of drowning out the pushy commuters and unpleasant companions who populate my transport home. You know who you are.

Sometimes I read.

Some days I play the poin’, pulling out my Visor and a few pirated versions of Palm Solitaire.

Occasionally I stare blankly out the window.

And, more often than not, I listen to talk radio.

My sampling of the season has been a bizaarely sexist self.proclaimed.train.wreck of a radio show known as Tom Leykis. (You can tune in electronic.radio.like on Mojo between 3 and 7 PST every weekday. But be warned. This is not an old man talking politics. I’ve come to listen and not take too much of his “advice” to heart. In fact, listening has become an exercise in filtering the grains of truth from the bushels of candy wrappers surrounding the nuggets of so.called wisdom.

However…

The real culprit — the real downfall of society apart from the glitz and glamour of a metallica.riff and some shocking one-oh-one — often comes more cryptically. What is that? What do I mean? What the heck am I talking about now?

Every morning I wake up to the radio — at six.twenty.five the voices blare from a few inches aside my head — and what do I hear? Endorsements.

Ads? You’re complaining about a couple of ads?

No. It’s not necessarily the ads that bother me. Its something a little more subtle. A tone. A hint of malfunction. A whisp of something I can’t quite explain. Four talk show hosts who spend their mornings undermining the work of so many others to shape and manifest the best intentions of society by fragmenting good taste with bad directions and glamourizing discourse. I don’t even think they know they are doing it — and if they do, they are using it for sheer ratings. Sad. Disturbing. Numbing.

But still I listen.