I spent 30 minutes on a bus from downtown to south Seattle and for the entire ride I listened to two high school aged kids bragging to one another about how gangster they were, even though they both looked like choir boys.

One talked about the adrenaline he gets when he fights to which the other responded that he doesn’t even get adrenaline rushes when he fights anymore, he just laughs. The whole conversation seemed to weigh on upping the last sentence spoken by the other: you punched someone? I got shot at! You got shot at? I shot as some fools. You shot at someone? I know a dude that tried to blow up his school, so they expelled him from the state. (I’m not making the last one up…they didn’t arrest the guy, they expelled him from the state.)

Slowly the conversation got more and more inline with gangsta stereotypes: talk about being shot at, drive-bys, various gangs in the area, people they know outside of the city and state who are in or started gangs, how other local gangs are lame, random theories about the gunshots they heard last night and whether they were AK-47 shots or whether the shooting was done with a “MP,” since a real gangsta needs to know the differences…cause seriously, I know I don’t want to get hit with a blast from an AK-47, but getting shot with an MP, not so bad.

Anyhow, at one point one of the kids was talking about how he was totally going to kick some other dude’s ass, “just now,” but the bus showed up and he couldn’t pop the kid because he’d miss the bus. The bus we were riding comes every 10 mintues, which I seem to recall being plenty of time to talk trash and throw some punches before walking away shaking from the adrenaline referenced earlier.

My favorite part of the conversation, “So that dude you were going to fight, he’s goes to a public school, right?” I took this to imply that the well dressed and well spoken gangstas were private school kids.