Somewhere Off The Sixty-Four

They say ideas come to you when you least expect them. At the place of least-expectation, I begin to wonder who ‘They’ are because ‘They’ are right. Ideas seem to enjoy my mind mostly when I’m making my way home on the bus. Of all places, the bus: the routine, the mundane, the dull. They present themselves to me in a language, not of letters and phonemes, but of spheres of emotions. With ease, I welcome them in, quickly translating them into our conventional ordering of sounds, then morphemes, sentences because otherwise, just as promptly as they come, they are gone and lost forever in a void of tissue and neurons; they die, or rather fade, much like a dream upon waking; much like a September breeze on the sun-kissed faces of sandcastle-building children: appreciated, but ignored. This habit of being so receptive to ideas on buses has become so significant to me that I now tend to measure my development and maturity through specifically that: I have come to think of my life as a long series of bus rides. Somehow, on that window seat plugged into my headphones which are playing the carefully selected music on my music player, I have no name, no gender, no past and no future. I am an energy; a presence. I am simply a carnal vessel for ectoplasmic, shapeless yet undeniably shaped concepts. And hence, the bus ride home becomes not a chore but an energizing, fulfilling experience; a connection with the intellect and beyond. I don’t have to close my eyes. On the contrary, it helps if I don’t. Watching people outside on the street connects me to an intuitive sense of collective unconscious. Like Midnight’s child I tumble forth into the world, not of smell, touch, sound, sight, taste as separate entities, but into the world of the senses heightened and combined.