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When my bus comes in every weekday morning, there are people standing around the aisles, crammed and stiff. And then, because my stop is across from a high school and these people are students, the bus all but empties out and I am granted a seat for my 20-30 minute commute. It is heaven.

I've worked places I needed to drive an hour to and I've worked places I've been able to walk to in 15 minutes. Whatever the merits of my current job, whatever the benefits of working from home, if I have to commute anywhere, this is my ideal journey. I can read part of a book or listen to most of an album and feel that I've had some time to and for myself before the job begins. I have a seat on a bus and a half hour to kill. Believe me when I say I do not mean this to sound depressing: Sometimes the commute is one of the best parts of my day.

Comics and poems make for perfect bus reading. You can burn through a comic or a dozen poems and feel that you've had a full experience, and they grant you something to think about on the walk between bus stop and office besides "Here comes work." There's also less danger of getting so swept up in a book you miss your stop if that book is divided into smaller bites. I have a three-year-old, which means most of my reading has to happen on a bus, because my free time is spent playing with him and/or trying to make sure he does not hurt himself. Lindsay Hunter's Daddy's, a book of very short stories, made for perfect bus reading. Oni Press' handful of EC Comics series, quick Tales From The Crypt-style horror bites, have been similarly nourishing, even if I'm sometimes worried the person behind me is seeing some horribly gory splash page and assuming I'm the next Ed Gein. David Berman's Actual Air, the greatest book of all time, is full of one-page poems that will not fail you.

I don't have the nerve to read Actual Air alone at a bar. I don't have the time to read it in a park. I don't have the silence to read it at home. This is not a bad thing-- I wouldn't trade playing with my son for some quiet time with a book, and I'm not just saying that because the kid will be able to read this in a few years. He takes priority. But the commute is dead time, and I'll gladly take advantage of any short break in a busy day.

I don't mean to illustrate the commute like an ideal way to spend twenty-to-thirty minutes. The bus can suck. I still get annoyed when people stop in the aisle at the front of the bus, clogging the way for everybody else. It's 2025 and some people don't realize that standing next to an empty seat blocks its use just as efficiently as actually sitting in it would, which leads to the awkward crush of a full bus with empty spots a person could occupy if the dude staring into nowhere bothered to remember his body took up physical space. But when everybody approaches the space respectfully, when I don't unwittingly sit down in a cloud of farts and body odor, the bus is the best mode of transportation in the city, despite how Harrisburg wants to treat it.

My commute takes me to Old City, either one or two neighborhoods away from my home depending on your belief in the existence of SoNo Libs, a couple square blocks optimistically given their own name that'll catch on any day. I used to live in Old City (before I got a job there, sadly), and I love having regular access to it. I love running into Benjamin Franklins on their lunch breaks at the Wawa, looking at phones that would make the real Ben's mind crack open. I love that I get to walk through beautifully upkept parks after the bus drops me off. I love having access to Brave New Worlds and The Book Trader, where I can stock up on stuff for future bus rides. My job gives me a quick thirty-minute-long lunch break, and I'll gladly blow the entire thing walking to a book store if something good's just come out or I've been given a strong enough recommendation for a book I wasn't familiar with.

The ride home is worse than the ride in. It's busier. I'm antsier to get to my destination and relax with my family. There are fewer Ben Franklins out at 5pm than there are at 8:30am. Still, I cannot take time away from work for granted. I just cannot pretend time riding the bus is worse than the hour I used to drive between Philly and Wyncote, PA, sitting in traffic and listening to great albums in lousy enough contexts the music started to lose its luster. I can't pretend one bus giving me a straight shot home is some tortuous experience compared to transferring between the wholly unpredictable Regional Rail and the Market-Frankford Line every morning. I haven't had that many jobs in the greater Philadelphia area, but they've each been spread out enough that I know to appreciate a decent thing when I've got it. I'm employed, I have a manageable commute and I'm literate. I'm not going to say anything crazy. I'm not going to pretend there isn't anything more I could want out of life. But I have a commute that offers a space for light productivity. I also have a shelf full of books I've been meaning to read, some for a couple decades. I'm not mining coal and I'm not at the mercy of a series of barely-scheduled trains. I know enough to make the most of this time.