I’m waiting at the bus stop.

Woooooo.

Ever notice the city in mid November is entirely made of brown? Light brown dark brown. Everything is some shade; even the things trying not to be. Reddy brown. Blue brown. brown brown. Lots of grey, too… in the brown.

So I’m standing at this grey brown kerb like I’m on a tickity tickity timer. Waiting for the bus so I can climb on the bus and wait to get off the bus.

Is it yesterday? Last year? Does it matter? This here existence doesn’t discriminate in that way. Just a rat in someone else’s maze. Or whatever they’re churning out at the metaphor factory today.

I guess at least the maze gets changed occasionally. Well.. once at least. Ten years ago I would have been waiting on the other side of the street to get bussed off to a dirty coffee shop to stand in between a bunch of cranky assholes and their caffeine.

Ten years. Christ.

So, like every morning, I get to stand there, trying to ignore these shitty people and their shitty smells. Contemplating the brown-ness of everything. Pretending I’m any different from them. Different from the metalhead who just won’t stop practicing obnoxious drum-lines on his thighs. Different from the super old, grubby dude with an arm growing out of his head, muttering about something, muttering about muttering, every day.

At the office, I’m sitting on whatever chair happens to be at whatever desk I happen to be at. Headphones on, jacked in. “Your call is very important to us.” “The Company would like to apologize for any inconvenience.” I don’t work for The Company. I work for a company that works for The Company. But I am a representative of The Company and people from all over the world want to talk to me, because their CBS morning show has been replaced by some message about needing to pay their bill in order to get their shitty dumbed-down fix.

Lunch is the same as lunch yesterday. The afternoon shift is the same as the morning shift. And the bus ride to home is just the bus ride from home played in reverse. It's like at lunch I take the tape out and flip it over so it’ll be back to Side 1 when my alarm blares the next morning.

Home is home. I tell Anna about the dumbest shit that happened at work. She tells me about the coolest shit she learned about in class. I play video games for longer than I mean to. We squabble over I should have already started making dinner and I should have already picked up dish soap.

Then we sink into the sofa, three feet apart and click on the TV to get some fucking culture.

Couple days of this. Couple days of that. Netflix and actually chill the fuck out, man. Then binge watching myself binge drinking another weekend away.

And before you know it, I’m waiting at the bus stop.

That’s my life.

But I have a secret.

[They dance]

You know when you’re on the bus, right? You ever miss your stop because you’re distracted by the telepathic link you have with an incomprehensibly distant sentient planet?

Yeah? No?

Like a distant PING and then BAM and then what the fuck… suddenly I am missing my stop because I am way too literally spaced out to ring the ding thing.

Everyone on the bus probably staring. What’s UP with him! What’s WRONG with him! But I’m not even… it doesn’t matter. I’m traversing space time with my mind and it’s… it’s really fucking cool.

I’ve had like… little inklings of this something something crop up throughout my life. But this space-case really leaves the space station about two years ago.

I was, surprise surprise, waiting at the bus stop. Suddenly it starts to rain cold and I just stand there just getting drenched. I’m on the verge of turning back toward my apartment and I…

I get this weird like pin-prick in my whole body. But it keeps going, somehow, like opening up. Like a single pin extending into me under my skin and then expanding out to meet itself. I’m standing there… my arms… I’m vaguely aware my arms are going up and down… kind of… flapping slowly. But all I can see is this mess of garbled colours. Reds and purples mostly, but also colours that… I haven’t ever seen before. And I know that’s kind of definitely a cliché, but that’s what happened… And now all my ticklish parts are getting hit at the same time and the tickling gets louder and louder and I decide I’m going to die.

And then it’s over.

I’m partly aware of what’s around me. Then suddenly that hole the pin prick in my conscious opened up wells over with this sense of something I can’t quite figure… something extraordinarily far away and laaaarge. Like little me a tiny tiny invisible silhouette dot standing in front of this massive fraction of a much more massive sphere.

A planet. Her epic mass and epic distance filling my perception. Settling in under my skin. I can sense her… flows. Her systems. Her breath. Warm and cold at the same time.

And then it’s just this world. The street. Cars going past. The rain stopped though. But… did it even rain?

So that’s something.