Enid was Dead All Along.
She had comitted suicide and was haunting the town as a ghost. The mysterious tagger is trying to inform her of this. The events of the story are actually Enid's confused ghost remembering why she decided to kill herself. When she recovers her memory, she realizes the same things that didn't make her town worth living in make it even less worth haunting and she catches the bus to the afterlife.On a recent rewatch (live with Zwigoff for a Q&A), it felt like Enid making amends with Rebecca and Seymour was possibly a dream, something like Enid dreaming of a perfect ending for her life. Learning those two scenes were last-minute, cheaply-done reshoots almost lends credence to Enid being dead well before the movie is over.
The bus carried away your old baggage.
The old man was headed nowhere else in his life. Enid was headed nowhere else due to her inability to be a real person and not a pretentious bitch. The old man boarded the bus when it was his time to discard his old self, stop waiting around bitterly for death, and start enjoying the life he had left. Enid (dressed more conservatively than we usually see her; for Enid, that means anything that's not ironic, shock value, or punk wannnabe) boarded when she realized that she had nothing left to due except rethink her life and how she has now alienated two good friends. Although she was able to patch things up a little with Seymour and Rebecca, it was clear that the two of them were ready to just move on in life without her, for the sake of their own peace of mind. The light at the end of the tunnel was that Enid still had a decent relationship with her father and could start working to improve herself and become a more authentic person. The well dressed Enid boarding the bus represented discarding her shallow persona and going to a new phase in her life where she would build meaningful relationships and have respectful, meaningful interactions with people. The singer/guitarist from Blueshammer was miming guitar badly in universe too.
- Sure it could just fall under Artistic License – Music, but a having a guitarist onstage who can't actually play guitar and is just miming to a prerecorded backing track fits in with the idea that they're supposed to be a bad, "inauthentic" blues rock band. Possible in-universe explanation: the real lead guitarist left the band but the singer was enough of a Small Name, Big Ego he thought he could take over having never played guitar in his life, so the band secretly mutes his guitar every night and pumps in recordings of the old guitarist's parts, and neither he nor the fans know the difference. Alternately he's aware he's not really playing and mimes for the sake of image - the real guitarist could have stage fright, or they just don't have the right "look" so they keep them offstage, or another member onstage could be the real guitarist but it looks better if the band's frontman has a guitar. Maybe they're all miming instruments to begin with and the singer's just the worst at it or the only one not taking it seriously.
