At the front of the bus a younger man dressed in tight green and blue plaid pants, a black velvet jacket held together with safety pins, and a full face of make-up (foundation, eyeliner, mascara, lipstick, and lip liner) was having some kind of discussion with a middle aged man carrying a big plastic bag and wearing a baggy brown t-shirt. I couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but as they both made their way to the back of the bus, where I was sitting, they took seats just a few aisles away from one another, and while the older man apologized to the younger man with his thick Cuban accent, the younger man sorta chuckled and said all was forgiven and “there’s a big difference between punk rock and a person’s sexuality.”

I assumed the Cuban man called the punk rock man gay or something for some reason.

The younger man talked about how he just left his girlfriend’s house, he’s a musician, and he explained that “I wear make-up because I hate humanity. All of humanity.”

From there the young man and the middle-aged man started talking about music. The older man said he played drums, the younger man bass. The older man asked if it it was hard to learn, and the younger man said “Well I play keyboards. Synthesizers. Bass parts are all done with synthesizers in the music I play.”

He talked about his industrial band, but he never mentioned their name.

He also said:

“Music’s the only thing that matters. Politics, the president, none of it matters. It’s all fake. Music’s the only thing that changes society.”

“Everyone wants to be an artist, but not everyone is an artist.”

“Rap is not really the highest form of music. Funny thing is I make music the same way those guys do (read: those guys meaning “mainstream rap artists”), I push a lot of buttons too, except I make real music.”

The the older man, with his Cuban accent, asked if he used Pro Tools to record.

“A little bit. I like the old-school ways of sequencing. Pro Tools is too California Hollywood bullshit.”

He continued to talk a lot about how a lot of things are bullshit, and I got off the bus.