Bus Driver Drunk Suicide

[still lookin 4 the face i had b4 the world was made]

On Mon, 12 May 1997, Kyle Grieser wrote:
> > > You know that quote--" Living inside the system is like driving across
> > >  the countryside in a bus driven by a maniac bent
> > >  on suicide."
> > >    - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"
> 
> Of course, all of us that grew up riding the bus to school knows this
> feeling :-).

My G-d, yes.  I had this one driver I will never forget.  She was a 
small, skinny black woman.  I remember her clutching the
enormous wheel with her thin arms, marveling that she could handle the
vehicle.  There was this one monster pothole on the way to school...it
was not far past a bridge over a canal.  Even before the bridge, she'd start
accelerating...we'd swoop over the bridge, my stomach lagging sickeningly
behind the rest of my body...and then the craziest kids would cluster at the
back of the bus, on the approach to the Pothole of Doom.  The front wheels
would SLAM over the hole--then the back wheels, SSLLAAMM!!, and kids in the
back seats would actually go flying over into the seat in front of them.

I think my childhood experience in the absurd, nay insane, bureacratic,
sadistic, thoroughly non-education nightmare of the Miami public schools
prepared me well to be a Pynchon fan.  (It also made me love _Brazil_.) 

Max

 M a x i m u s  D a v i d  C l a r k e | All journeys have secret
          http://www.afn.org/~traveler | destinations of which the
                 "Surrealist-At-Large" | traveler is unaware.
                      traveler at afn.org | --Martin Buber