how to ride the the ripta

some of the best soulsearching in the world can be done on the ripta 60 bus. take the outbound from providence on a weekday night. take the 10:40; it will be half-empty. there will be a place to sit in the back, a seat on the right, where you’ll be able to see the water.

while providence recedes, dream. take those first ten minutes, when the driver roars through open highways, as a meal. wonder if providence is a capital. whose capital? what capital? from where capital? to whom capital?

by barrington, you’ve slipped from politics to poetry. you wonder at the roger williams girl two seats up, who glances at a book of marx, but never changes the page.

read the ads in the bus. read the signs that float by illluminated in the night. read a book you brought, but don’t really read it. read it until you notice someone looking at you while you read. looking at you, like you were looking at them. look up! but not at them. stare straight ahead into an infinite distance in front of you, as though you’ve been struck by a profound overwhelming genius. look like something in that book caught fire in your mind, and now you burn with meaning.

hunt down a newspaper. scan for one of those occassional articles on the strangest-almost-an-accident-chance-would-have-it stories. laugh. Or if you can’t find anything appropriate, laugh like you’re remembering a joke. then smile.

call a friend. tell them you can’t talk long. remark on the view from the mount hope bridge. pretend as you cross the bridge that’s a narrow road to the stars. reflect on how narrow the mount hope bridge is. consider it as a metaphor.

look at someone long enough to create a lifestory for them. allow them to do the same. reflect on how you look to them. imagine the lifestory they wrote for you.

would you prefer that lifestory?

wonder if you will ever go to that bar in bristol by the water with the mermaid sign.

lament when the bus chooses one road and not the other, that some potential path has been lost. remember that they both go to the same place, there just different ways to get there.

pick a street in portsmouth, you’ve never been down before and vow to visit.

try to decide if that street is another homogenous housing development. or not.

forigve middletown for only showing you her commercial half. remember that there’s more to every town then it’s malls.

welcome newport.

try to guess how people are going all the way to the end.

go all the way to the end.

get out, thank the driver, and walk straight to the harbor to reflect.

reflect on how you reflected better in the bus.

you can do a lot of soulsearching on the 60.