The metaphor of missing the bus is not lost on me. I’ve looked other dreams up on those online dream analyzers that also try to sell you Prozac and Viagra, but not the bus dream. It seems almost too obvious, too blatant, as if the dream analyzer program would be like, “Come on now. Really? You couldn’t figure that one out on your own?”

To be mocked by computers is one of my secret fears. Somewhere out there, someone is keeping track of all the words I need to look up on Dictionary.com and making broad statements regarding the American public school system. “You don’t know how to spell potato?” “No,” I retort. “Dan Quayle F-ed me all up, and I never recovered.”

Regardless, I spent the morning once again lost in thought, trying to pinpoint the exact moment I first began “missing the bus.”

Maybe it was last year when I took that job everyone told me not to take, at the inner city school where no one else wanted to work, as some sort of screwed up attempt at societal amends.

Maybe it was when my brother first told me I was an alcoholic. I listen to him on the other end of the telephone as I poured myself another drink.

Maybe it was when I was eighteen and my father said something. Instead of backing down, I said something too. And with that, I loaded up my 1983 yellow Honda Accord Hatchback with my duffel bag and enough anger to last a lifetime, and headed east out of Houston.

But in the dream, I am a kid. This leads me to think, I must have missed the bus really early on in life. I wonder what happened that day.