GRATING SPACE

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I stood on a patch of grass at a truck stop where my Megabus driver took a break this morning around 8am. It felt so spongy. I realized I hadn’t stood on grass in months.

It is sunny and warm in Kansas, and I am wearing my David Lynch shirt. A perfect fit.

I often ascertain situations and concepts with what I feel, while ascertaining them, is the utmost clarity. I go over their various components with a calm and rational mind and figure out their complexities and moving parts, thus gaining an understanding of them until I almost feel that even the most multifaceted problems become completely obvious. I then share my conclusions with my friends, and they say, “But Nate, you’re not thinking about this element of it,” and I change my mind almost completely.

Being a veteran Greyhound rider, I find the camaraderie on the Megabus a bit lacking. There are far fewer stops, which gives people less time to mix and mingle among riders they’re not sitting near. The one complaint I hear most about the Greyhound is that it’s filled with freaks and weirdos. I sort of miss this aspect of bus rides on the Megabus. No more are the welfare moms with five obnoxious children, but instead there are college students watching movies on their laptops at full blast without headphones. At least the mom and her children have character, and not just baseball caps, messy buns, sweat pants and trust funds.

One similarity between Megabus and Greyhound: Invariably on both brands of bus, the drivers will switch out around four or five or six in the morning, and the haggard bus captain who’s been driving all night and would just as soon fall asleep at the wheel as she would talk to you is replaced by another driver, infinitely more chipper. The new driver gets on the megaphone and introduces himself with zest, gives all the requisite information (no smoking or drinking, 45 minutes ’til Toledo), which attracts the one person on the bus who can’t sleep and feels lively at that ungodly time, who moves to the front of the bus, where you happen to be sitting, and begins talking to the driver loudly about the one thing he can think of to talk to a bus driver about: driving buses. Unfortunately, bus drivers respond well to people who are interested in their trades, as most of us do, therefore making it unlikely that he would not mind if the rest of the passengers, who are trying to sleep, gagged this bastard with a felt hat and shoved him into the bathroom for the remainder of his trip.

Some guy is waving his poison ivy hand around the room at everyone now. I’m out of here.