#344

Keep coming back to it these days, so I might as well write it down. Elaborately optimize it. Trick it out, even. 

So, it can take place in a bus, since I know how to drive one, and why shouldn't I one day get my hands on one and cock it up to run on, I dunno, momentum. How's that for an optimized fantasy. My bus runs on its own momentum, and generates starting energy and impulse from running a charge sent from a switch connected to a bundle of 5-cell batteries powering electromagnets in the wheel wells and a mechanical man under the hood. It is this man who starts the engine, using a furnace that burns clean and runs on his own good cheer even as he does, and is never in short supply.

Ok. The bus runs. Silently. Maybe, sometimes, when everything and everyone is quiet, you might become aware of a nearly silent, humming grumble. And it plays this playlist I've been working on, and whatever else anybody wants to play no hassle, high quality sound. We'll call the bus Mighty Jake III.

All the highways and byways are empty of other vehicles. It's just our bus. The fields and towns and cities of the land remain populated, but only we drive. The transit is, as it were, sublimated. Otherwise it's all the same. Perhaps the empty highways are only an illusion, but we do not trouble ourselves about that, or about anything. The rest stops serve food as homemade and good as the diners, which use organic ingredients worked on by happy cooks well-paid and treated with dignity. Everywhere we go, we are treated with dignity, and treat everyone we meet with dignity. Everybody has enough money. Everybody's bills are paid. Nobody's got somebody back home who's laid up sick. Everything's tranquil.

MJIII's passenger area doesn't have to conform to safety standards or the rules of dimensional space, so usually it's sized more like a big van, everyone sitting comfortably, but not as comfortably as, say, in a given living room. The conditions and particular sensations need not be uncomfortable physically but adhered to; the body's sense that transit is happening, that everyone is closer together with fewer avenues of movement than they would be in most other contexts. But it's hammocks, it's beanbags, it's what you most need and the most you can get. When it's time for sleep, when some privacy is what's needed, the passenger area can be much bigger on the inside, TARDIS style. Need a shower? Not while the bus is moving, but whenever else, along with getting some laundry done. 

It begins with just me, rolling out in Jake all by myself. After I back the thing into the street, I open the door for Ezra and the cats, who live in a large, enriched section which travels with us without moving, MJIII's own extradimensional top deck. Ezra, looking forward to meeting everyone and introducing me to everyone, for that is the project--gathering the scattered handful of friends and family scattered through time and space whose faces we have not looked upon in for too long a spell, those whom we cherish no matter how long we must miss them. 

Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, Miami, NYC, and that's just the big ones and that's just for starters. We have stops in Canada, Great Britain, Spain, Italy, Russia, China, and Japan, We have stops in Nairobi and Baghdad and Warsaw and Istanbul. 

After that it's just terribly personal invented dialogues concerning pieces of music and thoughts about life, an imaginary communion. Maybe someday I'll write it down, maybe as itself, maybe as something some characters are chewing on together. I'll try to make them beautiful, because in my mind, it is so beautiful, driving a pretend vehicle while I talk to absent friends and the dearly departed about what I really want them to hear, what I would give to relish in hearing them say.

*

Hey! Hop in. That all you're bringing? No, my dear, my darling--like our hearts, like our love, like our crazy-ass heads, this bug's bigger on the inside. 

--JL