This graffiti, on a 47, reminds me of one of my early rides on Muni. I used to take the 1 to and from work. One night, on the way home, every time there was an announcement, the guy sitting behind me would grumble, “Goddamn talking bus.” The ride home was about 14 blocks, and he was on the bus when I got on and still on it when I got off, so I can only assume that this continued until his destination.
We found Jesse at Muni Diaries Live: Breaking It Down in April 2010. He obliterated the audience storytelling portion of that night with his story of the Misfired Projectile in Tiffany’s Airspace. We stayed on the case, and got this unassuming, yet totally charm-your-pants-off young man back up on stage for his deserved full set.
At last month’s Muni Diaries Live, Jesse shared the story of withering away of innocence when it comes to riding Muni:
I grew up and went to high school in Southern California. I did what everybody else did — I drove a car … I graduated high school and I fled, like crazy. I went to San Francisco State. I didn’t even look at the school — I just knew it was in San Francisco and gay people live there!
And I encountered Muni. I encountered buses, and trains, and trains that did buslike things, and stairs, and all that craziness. I was flabbergasted, to say the least. Riding Muni was like riding a unicorn. It was like, “What??!? I get a transfer? This is so great! $1?” I’m dating myself.
I was that guy on Muni who was so in love with the experience that I was talking to people. I was like, “Oh my god, you shopped today? So did I!”
Watch the video above to hear the rest of Jesse’s gripping tale.
Oh, San Francisco. In December, we posted about a series of Bank of America ads that deigned to use “the Muni” and “the BART.”
Commenter JC Dill now informs us that the megabank has updated their ads with the correct non-use of the definite article. Or, as Language Logs notes, goes “anarthrous.”
My wife accuses me of seeing likenesses where they don’t exist. Which has led me to question my own (uncanny) ability to see likenesses all over the place. I call them “bizarro,” which gets me off the hook as I can point to vague similarities instead.
But @thedrun‘s photo up there is 100 percent, spot-on, so incredibly like what we all think it is, you have to wonder …
Not much I could add to what Tosh.0 editors had to say about this. Except that maybe someone at the ad agency should’ve noted the unfortunate placement of this ad … on a bus. To their credit, the ad doesn’t say, “It happens in here.”
