Books at Grandma’s House.

Mother Teresa looked
andlookedandlookedandlooked
For fifty years
(under the rug, inbetween the cushions of her sofa, in her sock drawer)

All of that extraterrestrial space
Just yellowed paper and candle wax
She confided
to no one in particular

***

It is important to note
That Mother Teresa

It is important to note that Mother Teresa
Left mountains of paper bundled and stacked
Fifty years in the extraterrestrial space
And that those mountains seemed like pebbles
And that this was her big secret.

They couldn’t fill the space
and t
Mother Teresa’s
Train never arrived.
(anotherwaytosayit)

Mother Teresa
Confided that
Even with her ticket and fifty years on the platform
Her train never arrived.

And so what I wanna know is this:
whaty’ll I get for my ticket?

Hell is other people (not going to the carnival you’re already avoiding).

There’s probably no bathroom here.  And if there is, it has a key and the door is on the side of the building.

This publication is dedicated to the pursuit of skills (among other less important things).  It has documented game-show hackers (pre-internet), video-game virtuosos, and race-car driving bike-riding video-game-shooting master Italians.  Each of these examples document individuals with skills that were acquired only through impossibly hard work and that have no redeeming societal value.  Why are they working so hard?

I don’t know.

I really don’t know.  Hard work is an exercise in extreme failure.  Each excruciating step in the process is planted right on the back of another attempt’s failure.  The enigma of it all is exaggerated when you consider the game-show hackers that have been previously discussed.  It is as if the concept of hard work has been narrowly defined as a 9 to 5 job in a factory; any task that does not involve that experience is considered constructive and/or worthy.  Everything else is a cliche from Office Space.  So as long as the man is working on his own project in his own way, then it is worth the extreme effort.

More to come…

Until then, what does Rakim have to say about this?

How to play Bridge in your basement rec room in August.

Waiting at a bus stop is your weakest, smallest, most ignorant (in the technical sense, not a personal stupidity sense) moments in your day.  You cede all sorts of control and information that you could use to understand the context of your wait to a process that is subjected to a variety of forces hellbent of ruining it.  Traffic, weird passengers, sick drivers, bad weather, rogue North Carolina farmers – all of them are out there ready to make you wait even longer.  The only thing you can do is stand there and hope the bus will make it.  It always does but the relief you feel when you can grab a seat on your bus is not appreciation for an efficient public transportation infrastructure; it is Stockholm Syndrome.

When you wait at a bus stop, you are waiting passively.  All of the variables in the interaction – the bus stop, the bus route, the bus number, the schedule (ha!), and finally you – are relics of an age where information required organization to be recovered.  Encyclopedias broke subjects to their elements so that an alphabet would lead you to some data.  A city would determine the most valuable routes to serve a population of commuters.  Everybody understands why these systems were originally designed and we have learned to live with the consequences.  Buses are always late; they are always clustered when they arrive; and you can’t change that.

When Slate.com asked readers to propose updates to public transportation, I proposed a solution that would change the way users wait for buses.  This realignment would revolutionize the way people relate to their public transportation.  Rather than considering buses as road-trains (fixed to a track-like bus route and schedule [ha!]), people will think of buses like livery cabs.  This is a valuable shift and one that would increase reliance on the bus system and improve mobility in a city.  My solution was called Smart Buses.

Smart Buses inverts the call/stop button on a bus.  In the old system, a rider waits at a bus stop for a specific bus to arrive.  The rider then pulls a rope to tell the bus to stop at another bus stop to depart.  In a Smart Bus system, the rider calls a bus at the initial bus stop and is picked up by a bus waiting for the call.  The Smart Bus then drops the rider off at a pre-determined destination (that was indicated at the initial call).

In this new system, the wait at a bus stop is active.  You are not waiting for a random process to notice you – you are calling for attention.  It is a shift in power and a streamlining of information.  The variables are simplified and the incentive to riding the bus is greatly improved.  Riders stuck across town can find their way to jobs anywhere in the system without depending on a limited set of bus routes.

More on this to come. (ha!)