The Rules of Engagement
It's white instead of green, so it could be a truck... except for the t-bar at the top, visible through the shimmers of heat (and it's only September).
I don't want to sit in this box, sliding past the sun, glimpsing life through a sliced doorway. I want to get drunk in the garden; I want to touch the t-bar in the shimmering heat.
Once I saw a woman carry a cask of wine onto a tram. Totally insouciant. Once I carried a tiny kitten onto a bus inside of a wine cask. A woman who looked at me shocked was a model and a heroin addict. The local press made her famous for fucking up her career. To the junkies she was just another junkie, with a boyfriend in jail and a baby to feed.
The man opposite me has liver-spotted hands. The man across the aisle fumbles behind him for the button. He touches someone else's suit. The suit looks like he didn't even notice. He boarded with rare self-possession. A girlfriend once maintained that there is an etiquette to boarding a tram, although in retrospect I think it was just a self-invented rule: Don't just sit down. Check it out, both carriages if it's a double.
Mobile phones: pinging. Tram bells: ping, ping. And still the sun through the sliced doorway.

FLAGSTAFF STATION
The station teeters on the brink of violent self-actualization. The muzak (Can you murder a song that's already dead?), the orange-brown tiles, the great white domes suspended from the arched ceiling all give the impression of subterfuge. If the platform were dark and ill-maintained, someone might get mugged, someone might jump out of the shadows and offer a tab of ecstasy.
I would rather that than the droning announcements ("The next train will be a sportscar"), the dying music straight off the Mike Walsh show. Way too crap to be retro. I would like to kill Judith Durham

KICKING THE SILVER DISC
Two women lean across the aisle to chat. There are rules governing personal space in public places, even between friends.