A simile.
My life is like a bus trip.
Not some little city bus ride. Iam a happy guy.
I had an earlier version of this where I said my life was a trip on one of Magic Bus Inc’s wild rides on old school buses. Overland from London to Bombay in 7 to 10 weeks, depending on wars. And in Afghanistan the bus would drop down into a valley, a valley with a six foot ground fog of death, the final moist exhalations of thousands of dying children. And I would ride on top of the bus above this fog. I would rescue a woman too, and spend days just holding her, squeezing her.Squeezing the stench of death out of her, scraping it off her skin and then bathing her with my own sweat having run out of clean water.
And so on. You get the flow.
But my life isn’t like that really. Other people have described their lives in some paraphrasing of the above. They’re fooling themselves too.
My life is like a Greyhound bus trip from Ottawa toVancouver. Not really that long. Not really that far. But enough to seem like eternity along the way.
And stop after stop after stop.It seems like you are always standing still. Except sometimes the bus will make a big jump ahead. Six or eight hours on the road. And then when it finally does stop you have forgotten what that feels like. And you get off the bus and almost fall because the world isn’t rushing by. You spend the 10 minute break just leaning against a wall and people mistake it for being cool.
And the bus windows. The bus windows are my existentialism (to be removedin case of emergency). The toilet at the back that nobody uses, but keeps your bladder from bursting just because it is there. That is my United Church upbringing.
And, Vancouver is like death.I’m not being cruel. I’ve been there. It’s true. A sicklyChristian heaven that is just a bland version of hell.
So the journey’s the thing.
(This is going well, better than I thought. I might be able to upgrade it, call it an analogy).
And back in the days before, back when all of me was always at least half engorged.I was traveling through forests and lakes and life was everywhere and it seemed … I don’t know, it just seemed.
The change is gradual. When you finally realize you are in the prairies you can’t even recall how long ago it might have started. And this is when lots of people (guys especially)hop off the bus, steal a red convertible and head northeast back in search of the Canadian shield.
But I was born in the prairies so I know what to look for. I was born middle-aged, in a geography with no limits but your eyes.
I could go on, but I’d have tostart making things up.