I had an appointment to get the last of my paperwork for my ever more mysterious overseas post finished this afternoon. A lot of the hold-up in the process has been due to my own foot-dragging, so blaming my doc for not faxing my medical records to Washington like he said he would seems a minor bone to pick, not to mention a wee bit disingenuous on my part. I could still blame him, though, and probably will. But the truth is it's because I still miss Dr. K, and always will, I fear. She would have sold her body for bus fare to the capital if that was the only way to get those papers delivered. I think we were soulmates.

Normally, when I have an appointment with my PCP, I ride my bike across the Charles, and I'm there in forty minutes, max. But these are the two to three months a year I buy a T pass, and I want to get all the juice out of it I possibly can (plus my bike's got a wobbly wheel I need to get fixed). So, the T it is.

Still, if I can avoid transfers, especially from one mode to another, I do. But to get to Boston Medical Center from Davis Square you have to transfer from subway to bus. The easiest way is the red line (newly dubbed "the Perv Line" by the Herald — which makes it sound a lot more exciting than it actually is) to Central ("Crazy Central" is more like it), and then take some iteration of the No.1 bus straight down Mass Ave. There is a rather mythical bus called the C1, that runs between Central and BMC with limited stops, which would have been ideal for the trip I had planned, but it disappeared into the mist before I could catch it.

Central is one of Cambridge's several ulcerated anuses (Cambridge is a many-anused beast), and aside from Harvard, is probably the vilest of the whole vile lot. Sometimes, when you haven't been someplace before, or in a long while, you can't tell if the people there look strange and hostile because the surroundings are strange to you and seemingly hostile, or if it's because the people really are strange and hostile in their own right. In Central Square, they are strange and hostile in their own right. Whether the square itself would be without them is a moot point. Absent the bird flu, we will never know. (You guys still aren't praying hard enough.)

I tend to avoid Central at all costs, at any rate. I know there's nightlife there, but I would be lying unconvincingly if I said I cared much about the nightlife hereabouts. As a transportation hub it is as much a nightmare as all of Metro Boston's transportation hubs. When I checked the T's website for where to catch the C1 bus, it indicated it was around the corner, on a side street, which is still considered the square, apparently.

Those of you unfamiliar with the peculiar geometry of these parts may find it hard to believe that something that looks roughly like this...


or this...

is called a square, which last time I checked, looked something like this...


But as everyone knows, there are some very clever people in Boston and even cleverer ones in Cambridge, so when they say this...

...is a square, who are we to argue? It's probably got something to do with imaginary numbers and cosigns. I snoozed through all that in high school, and now I am obviously paying the price.

Long and short of it is, for a good ten or fifteen minutes I stood off somewhere on the "square" none of my buses was every going to stop, until realizing that if I didn't catch some bus or other soon I was not going to make it to my appointment on time. Maybe it was self-sabotage. Maybe I don't want that mysterious overseas post, after all.

Street signage is not the best in these parts in general, so I wandered around with my head in my ass briefly, and then reasoned that since my route from here was a straight shot down Mass Ave., the bus might be leaving from the other extremity of the gerrymandered "square."

People were just climbing onto an already crowded #1 bus when I showed up, but I decided to wait for an express bus I had seen turning onto a side street a moment earlier. The #1 pulled out, and I waited and waited for the C1 bus, but wherever it had gone, it didn't seem to be coming back. Poor thing probably fell off a cliff around the corner and into that bottomless pit where the buses go.

After another five-ten minutes I realized it wasn't going to make much difference which bus I climbed on, I was going to be late. It was now a question of very late, or very, very late. I should have called and canceled right then instead of climbing on the first bus purporting to go to BMC. Mind you, there are no maps that show the route at the terminus. It was a #47, and as soon as I got on and it started off in the opposite direction, I knew I was taking the scenic route.

After wending through the side streets of Cambridge, the #47 goes over the Charles, through the Fenway, and then heads in the direction of JP, taking a little tour of the Longwood Medical Area, past the Fine Arts Museum, to Ruggles, then through the sprawling public housing developments around Dudley, and finally past Boston Medical Center. I know it doesn't sound like much, but let's just call the #47 route to BMC "circuitous."

But, again, it's not the MBTA's fault I got on the wrong bus (and it would not have done me any good to get off before I reached my destination, either). It was not really the MBTA's fault I was going to miss my appointment (I should have budgeted at least three hours to get there, since there was a transfer involved). So, instead of getting my panties in a bunch, I sat back and enjoyed the ride. I thought of it as a sight-seeing tour. Of Hell.

Needless to say, I missed my appointment. By the time I got there my doctor was long gone. They paged him, but he called back, saying he was tending to an emergency in the broom closet with a tube of KY. He's always got some emergency or other to tend to. You'd think he was the only doctor in the house. They do keep him busy.

The trip back on the C1 was crowded (it being the height of rush hour by now), but relatively painless. The whole excursion clocked in at three hours. Still, I felt strangely satisfied at having handled it with what I thought was admirable detachment. And I remembered now why it is I hardly ever leave the house.

The best part of the whole magical mystery tour, though, was at the end, when I dropped into Starbucks for an almond toffee treat (I earned it, bitches) right when they were cleaning the johns. I avoid the toilets in cafes like this at all cost. They are always post-apocalyptic gorefests. I mean, think about it. Coffee is a "powerful stimulant" for peristalsis, and a diuretic. That's a recipe for gore. These cafes where people languish and linger for hours on end, drinking coffee. Well, it may all look very civilized, with the laptops and the witty cell phone banter, but there's a lot of, how can I put this delicately, peristalsis going on under the surface. And that can only lead to one thing. And it ain't pretty.

I didn't have to go when I got there, and I wasn't staying, but the looks on the faces of several patrons who had butted in the line to ask the barista, with some urgency, for the key to the loo, and were told the wait could be fifteen to twenty minutes... priceless. I know it's awful to say, and the Hebrew God will surely revenge himself upon me with a plague of explosive diarrhea the next time I get on a public bus, but the situation is sort of comical, you have to admit, especially when you're not in it.

I mean, the fact that you have to go ask for the key in the first place. Its almost like you're asking permission. I understand why they do it. To keep the bums and the junkies from monopolizing the facilities. But still. And then to be a paying customer and be refused. And to possibly be in real intestinal distress. There has to have been a Seinfeld episode about this.

One woman was so distracted by the urgency of her peristaltic trauma that she just could not get her mind around what she was hearing.  She had to be told three times about the wait before it registered. At which point all the blood drained from her face.  She was obviously in a desperate state, poor dear. One older gentleman (who didn't look regular at all, I'm afraid) laughed bitterly when told. As if the pixie-ish barrista was punishing him in particular.

"May I have a venti cup?" he inquired.

"A venti cup of...?" she asked.

"Just the cup."

Obviously you can't have a coffeehouse without a functioning john. It's like a question without an answer. Fluffer without Nutter. Hillary without Bill. A coffee joint without a toilet is like an ancient Greek feast without a vomitorium.

But johns, especially in coffee shops, where they see a lot of wear and tear, have to be cleaned more than once a day. And patrons have to be prepared. Just as you should always check the exits in a theater and an airplane,  mark the escape route from your office building, and give yourself three hours to get five miles by T, you should always have a Plan B for your local Starbucks in case the mood happens to strike you when the toilet's are being cleaned.