Miracle Whip

I've had a lot of ideas about what to write. A lot. Too many. But nothing stuck until yesterday when I was on the bus. If you can call it that. It had the regular proportions of a bus, but it really was an infernal vessel containing all manner of human misery; a habitation of fallen angels. I'm not being the least bit dramatic. This was for real. All the passengers were crammed up against each other, sweating, most of them morbidly obese, some sitting taking up two or three seats with their amazing girth, snoring or burping. While the bus was full-up, the driver kept admitting more and more sad, big people, almost as if he thought the vessel would burst on impact, and cease to be. I must have inherited the sweat, blood, and tears of a hundred different DNAs - all co-existing, transporting, intermixing, by sheer close proximity. I'm not claustrophobic, but I was feeling a bit closed in, I have to admit. There was no where to breathe, no where to go, this is where the human design is ending up? Fat and immobile, sleepless and restless, stagnant and unhappy. I had to get out of there. My life depended on it.

My experience there on this and in this sub-human realm recalled a scene from Woody Allen's "Stardust Memories." Allen plays Sandy Bates, a successful comedic film director who wants to delve into serious subject matter. He's on a train that is clearly overrun with misery and depravity. He peers out the window, and there across the way, is a train with beautiful, happy, healthy people. It's a wonderful party, and he wasn't invited. A beautiful woman from the heavenly train blows a kiss at Sandy, and then her train departs. Two trains passing in the night and all that. Sandy wonders to himself why he's not on the "good" train, just as I wondered why I was not on the "good" bus. Why haven't I been at the party? The last two years has been a long, depraved journey of sniveling and sucking up, when all I want is pride and posture. I've worked hard. I have a good education. I'm young. I'm vibrant. I'm sick of being on the bad bus, I've done my time in purgatory; this damnable eternity that I am trying desperately trying to break. And then I saw it. The billboard that displayed a favorite American condiment: "Miracle Whip." I would never eat it, it sounds like mayonnaise's poor cousin, but I thought what a great name, great words standing side-by-side. A miracle that is whipped up, like good froth out of nowhere. That's what I need, some extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention. A miracle that would intervene in my bad bus affairs. I'm willing to work for it though. Just give me a chance. Something out of thin air sounds a bit far off, but nevertheless welcome, especially when you're in the bad bus/train looking at the good one.