Old Spice High Endurance

The bus pulled up right beside me and her doors burst open with a starship door hiss. It was a nice day, I planned on walking to school but the serpent whispered in my ear, "take the bus. Later, have some carrot cake with ice cream on top." I got on the bus. I realized immediately that it was a mistake--to small a space for so many people. I was trapped. There was a shadow puppet show of tree branches covered in flickering leaves, dancing over the blank faces of the passengers and over the yellow and red safety stickers stuck on the cold metal ceiling. I sat down in the seat closest to the door. A kid behind me shouted into his cell phone, oblivious to all the universe, "Shit ya. Dude. No way, I was so fucked up--I was waaa-sted." I turned quickly. I could help. Perhaps he didn't realize how rude he was being. He would appreciate a helpful social que.

It wasn't that he was unaware of his rudeness, it was that he didn't care. He shot me look that said, mind your own business. I turned in my seat trying to make eye contact with a sympathetic passenger. Is there anybody out there? I'll know the look when I see it. A look of recognition; yes, indeed things should be different; your on to something; let's burn something down, let's build something up. How rare it is for people to even look at each other in the eye today. The passengers on the bus averted their eyes, dialed their cell phones, tried to look busy with their techno gadgets. Their eyes weren't busy though, there was nothing behind their eyes.

I got off the bus a stop early. The bus drove away with my shadow, my stretchy shadow, bending and rattling all through the inside of the moving bus.

2:30: introduction to linguistics. A fascinating subject made dull once again. Why oh why can't we talk about the tower of Babel, about an emerging cyber language, about, about, about, origins, what is we're all doing when we talk and talk and talk, and why we don't talk anymore? Instead I got a preaching to about Ebonics and how it should be recognized as an official language. How boring. Diversity, oppression, equality...not that these things aren't important, just seems like they're self evident, like they shouldn’t need to be talked about ad noisome. I get it already. Put me on the moon, let me plant a flag on Titan. Let’s do something worth writing about.

I walked out of class early. I walked into the woods, a place I've been wandering to more and more. I sat on the hill and read a little from Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I guess she won the Pulitzer Prize. I just discovered her the other day on a dusty top shelf at the used bookstore. This passage leapt off the page it rings so true.

"Once I visited a great university and wandered, a stranger, into the subterranean halls of its famous biology department. I saw a sign on the door: ichthyology department. The door was open a crack, and as I walked past I glanced in. I saw just a flash. There were two white-coated men seated opposite each other on high lab stools at a hard surfaced table. They bent over identical white enamel trays. On one side, one man, with a lancet, was just cutting into an enormous preserved fish he'd taken from a jar. On the other side, the other man, with a silver spoon, was eating a grapefruit. I laughed all the way back to Virginia."