coming soon...

now that mars hill graduate school has moved into the heart of the city, this small school with a relational emphasis is getting a chance to test it's high wishes of relationality with the other. As the students and professors are leaving their cars and climbing aboard busses, a few of us will be starting a new blog called "riding the bus." It will have stories, reflections, frustrations, questions, pictures, etc. from the riding the bus. Look for it in the next week.
Note: If you are a MHGS student interested in contributing, let me know. Or if you don't want to join the blog but have a thought, a poem, a question, a picture etc. that you want posted, email it to me and I can post it for you.

Here's my first thoughts:

And the Beat Pounds On

Day two on the bus.
I am listening to Damien Jurado.
And the dancing guitar passes time
One-and-two-and-three-and-four-and-one-and…
I don’t need you anymore
I’m independent there is nothing to say

A girl sits next to me
The aisle divides us like the Great Wall of China
Men were killed – built into the wall
Slowly starving and suffocating in isolation
One-and-two-and-three-and-four…
I don’t need you anymore
I’m independent there is nothing to say

Her eyes are wide and her hello kitty boots are pink
And warm and small and holy
She watches me typing on my computer
Gently bobbing my head to the music playing in my own world
One-and-two-and-three-and-four…
I don’t need you anymore
I’m independent there is nothing to say

The song ends
A new one begins
One-two-and-three-and-one…
She thinks I don’t see her as she mimics my gentle head bobbing
The gentle waltzing rhythm and its earmuff like bearers separate us

I read a sign
It preaches the ten commandments of the bus:
“Respect other passengers’ privacy.”
It’s not an unwritten rule – it is a written
Written,
Printed on shining, colorful, appeasing paper
Cut from a 300 year old tree, recycled, recycled, recycled and finally static
Resting isolated, silent, like the rest of us
Its shrill silence preaches next to the burnt-out prophet
A picture of a doll eating a dead rat and the words,
“Kissing a smoker is just as gross.”

I stop to listen to Damien:
His voice is old and comforting
He reminds me of the days when
He and I rode solo in my car and I
Sang along as thought the world ended
At my broken windows and bumper-sticker ridden tail
The map of my world – of my tightly confined reality
Reads “Monsters lie here”
Now I, like Ferdinand Magellan stepped off the edge of the safe world
And my first mate sings: “I play the movies in my head.”
And the beat
Goes
On
One-and-two-and-three-and-one

I play the movie in my head.
I am on the bus. and
One
The music plays. and
Two
The music builds. and
Three
The music drives. and
One-and
My deep thoughts or voiced-over angst speaks
In beat and in turn
With the music.

With the music.

With the music.

And I’m not even listening as Damien strains his gentle voice.
The movie presses on
The screen pans to show thirty people
Raptured in the most uncreative and maddening aspect of film: montage
We all sit, bobbing our ignorant, inhuman heads
Each to the same beat
Each to the same fucking song
Each to the same bullshit imaginary movie
One-and-two-and-three-and-one-and
In this moment we are “we” fucking twisted as it is
The guitar strums pound more like death metal than folk
ONE-and-TWO-and-
The soundtrack is maddening.

I scream at the top of my lungs
But like in a dream when you are sure you woke up
And you tried to eat breakfast and
Brush your fuzzy teeth still rancid with the night before
And comb the entanglement from your hair
And shower off the memory of your unwanted dream
Only to realize you have not moved at all
All that comes from my valiant scream is
“ding”
And the lighted sign behind the bus driver sings:
“Stop requested.”