Don Mills 25

It's starting to become clear to me that taking the Don Mills 25 bus south from Don Mills subway station is very bad luck. It may be the most direct route from that point to my house, but from now on, I'm taking the Sheppard subway west, the Yonge subway south, and the Bloor subway east to get home whenever I find myself there. It's just easier.

The first time I made this trip, I managed to break my glasses, which was really annoying but has no good story behind it. I just thought they'd be safe in the pocket of my cargo pants and I was wrong. But this time, which is the second and last time, had sitting alertly in my seat, guarding against my own stupidity. Suddenly, I heard a choking cough directly behind me and the back of my head and neck was sprayed with a fine mist. I whipped my head around to see a guy with a bottle of Sprite, sheepishly covering his mouth. "Sorry," he said.

Since it was clearly an accident, I just got up, shot him my dirtiest Who the hell do you think you are -- the Great Muta? look, and stalked to the back of the bus. I sat down beside a big Jamaican lady who chucked at me good-naturedly and confirmed that the guy seemed to have accidentally choked and spat all over me. "That's what I call a drinking problem," I quipped, to her delight. But my mind was troubled by two things.

First, this isn't the first time this has happened to me, and I felt an intense sense of deja vu when I thought back a decade, to the events of my worst bus trip ever, the one when I got bong water sprayed all over the back of my neck in a curiously similar fashion. Frankly, once in a lifetime is enough for that kind of thing, and I want to know if I need to expect more of the same in 2013.

The second stems from the fact that I'd had some really bad luck earlier. I went CD shopping with a friend of mine and I'd bought five discs (First of a Million Kisses by Fairground Attraction, Asleep in the Back by Elbow, Agaetis Byrjun by Sigur Ros, Welcome Interstate Managers by Fountains of Wayne, and Wanna Meet the Scruffs? by the Scruffs), including one that's incredibly rare and I'd picked up for only $11 (the Scruffs one). Then we went to eat, then hit HMV. Somewhere between the restaurant and HMV (or at one of these locations, although the management of each place denies it), I managed to lose my CDs. That's like throwing away money and it really pisses me off. So up until this point, I was wondering if it had happened as punishment for all the music I've downloaded or as a justification for all the music I was going to download in the future. Now, I was wondering if the icky bus incident was just part of a continuing pattern of bad luck for the day that included my losing the CDs, or if I had actually lost the CDs because I was going to take the Don Mills 25 bus later on that day. If so, I think that might mean that the cosmos is actively plotting against me. That's serious stuff.

Oh, and later on during that bus ride, a pretty girl lost her balance and nearly fell in my lap, but then she didn't. So that was bad luck too. I hate the Don Mills 25 bus.