I'm arrogant. Really arrogant. I stand with The Chicken at the bus stop every morning and silently heap scorn on nearly everyone.

Chicken's bus is K-3, so all of the kids there are between 5 and 8 years old. Parents are required to accompany their children until the bus arrives, but few of them do. Instead they leave their kids to walk and wait alone. I can't help but think poorly of those parents.

There are a few parents who accompany their kids, like the bitchy woman in the red coat. But then she doesn't have much of a choice. Her daughter has some sort of disability and will probably one day ride a short bus. I look at this little girl and her bitchy mother and I can't help but think "fetal alcohol syndrome." I have no reason to suspect this other than this woman "looks like that type." She reminds me of dozens of young women I've seen drinking their weekends away in dimly lit taverns with country music jukeboxes and puddles of tequila on the bar.

There's another woman who's often at the bus stop. I sneer at this one because she apparently has enough money for expensive snowmobile clothing, but not enough money left over for a toothbrush. She stands off to the side in her bright green jacket and sucks on cigarettes through black, crumbling teeth.

The last parent looks like the snowmobile woman will in twenty years. She's a sweet woman, but I don't talk to her. It makes me uncomfortable to see her toothless grin. This woman is either poor enough, or just doesn't care, that she can't afford some conditioner to tame that nasty pile of frizzy hair.

Sometimes I tell jokes about invisible train tracks where all of these people live on the wrong side of them. I know it's not funny, but I tell the joke anyway. And sometimes I hate myself for it.

At the bus stop this morning, the angry young woman in the red coat had a peculiar welt on her left cheek. Cynic that I am, I now assume I know exactly why she's so angry all the time.