The 3 Rule Challenge or, How I Completed a 14 Hour Car Ride by Bus in 28 hours

I have this theory. Inside a Greyhound bus, time speeds up. Somehow a novel pedestrian conveyance such as the cross country bus has mastered the control of time and space, a feat that quantum physicists are still striving for. For instance, by car it takes fourteen hours to reach Minneapolis, Minnesota from Bozeman, Montana, provided that the roads are icy and the vehicle that is being employed on such a trek is an inefficient SUV, forcing a stop at every gas station.

By bus this trip doubles, although the distance and speed limit stays the same, proving that time outside of the bus is moving slower than the inside. To break it down further, for every one hour a person spends outside a bus, two hours are spent by the people inside of the bus. A shift in temporal stasis is the only real scientific explanation. Or perhaps was it stopping every five minutes so that the driver could take a five minute smoke break? This answer seems more reliable than quantum theory, but not nearly as entertaining.

The first rule of bus travel is that the person sitting next to another person cannot be someone who the original person wanted to sit next to. This plays out thus. I sat down in my seat, threw my backpack into the overhead compartment, and removed from that backpack The Cheese Monkeys by Chip Kidd. The gist that I received of this book was the tale of an undergrad student in the 1950’s, and his struggle with the power of influence versus being within the constructs of societal generated safety. I had just reached the part about his art professor saying that everyone can call her Dotty, and thus providing the frame work for the rest of the book that nicknames can seem like they make someone naked. That is when a beautiful red headed woman sat next to me.

The odds of this gamble were that I would be sitting next to a middle aged man named Carl that had a pack of zigzags, cheap pipe tobacco to roll them around, a prosthetic appendage and never ending ‘Nam stories that always ended with the whistling through the gap in his smile where a tooth should have been. Instead of having a little peace, I would become privileged to experience the stench of latex under body odor under the smell of cheap liquor and Listerine, as the fellow’s leg disconnected at the knee to “air out” for a few miles.
For this more attractive outcome, most males would become quite religious, mouthing thank you to whoever they look at when mouthing thank you. Whether it is God, Allah, Fate, Brett Favre, Homer Simpson, Mom, either way, this chosen deity seems to live on a thankful person’s forehead as they appear to stare at the heavens looking for something deeper.

She asked what I was reading. I said that I was reading The Cheese Monkeys. She asked “Oh. Is it good?” I said “so far,” and continued reading. She then sat and faced away from me. Not only did she seem turned off by the idea of sitting next to me, but I knew that despite the initial attraction that I had to this women, I was going home to propose to my girlfriend which trumps any notion of a shallow flirtatious fling. On top of all of that, I have never been one to be that forward with my notions of attraction, in fact I had been best friends with my then girlfriend for three years before I asked her out. Hasty relationships were not what I was about. She sat next to me none the less, and as I speculated a nickname for Elisabeth, (For there were many: Elle, Beth, Liza, Libby. It’s like verbal Kama Sutra with a name. ) I remained tied to Chip Kidd and his novel. All I wanted now was the chance to read; she probably wanted a tattooed bruiser of an army man who just came back from war looking for a warm bed to give him a welcome back party. Both of our interests were thwarted by each other's presence in an uncomfortable seat.

I continued reading the book. The plot took me to a point where a professor was asking a group of students to create a poster that influenced someone to do something. One submission was a simple black and white text poster that read “Whatever you do, don’t think about elephants."

The second rule is that no matter where the location, the bus must stop every five minutes for a smoke break. The Non-Smoking bus drivers would bend this rule a bit but the hard core smokers seemed to pull over every time their Camel logoed watch pointed to a number in the minute hand. This allows for common souls to huddle together in the elements, freeze outside, and talk to people they would rather talk to instead of those they have been paired with in accordance with rule one. This brings up Chet, a navy guy from San Diego. While on this smoke break, Chet walked up to Elisabeth and introduced himself. She replied with her own title as “Lizzy,” and began to talk about who she was, what she liked, and why she was attractive to
this fellow. Chet had recently got on the bus at a stop on the fringes of the twin cities, in fatigues, so his exposure to the three rule bus game was short. It was only later in the trip that I noticed he was a 3 rule challenge hustler. Not only had he played before, but he was an expert on this little travel activity.

I stayed on the bus. I don’t smoke, although I do believe I have a second hand addiction to smoking. Sometimes I am just more relaxed and less edgy around people who are lighting one up. My minor addiction to nicotine is satisfied by standing next to people that have a more profound attachment to the substance. I fear that the only way to break that addiction is chewing already used nicotine gum or wearing a spent patch to cure secondhand nicotine addiction. We all have our corruptions, this is plain to see, and we are told to glance over them like they don’t exist, but the difficult part of that is avoiding the pachyderm sized flaws
that we are told not to look at. I stayed in the bus reading for 10 minutes, the smokers came on the bus at five minutes, so now the relative time warp of the Greyhound bus was satisfied at stasis again. The Diesel engine fired up and we were on our trek again.

The third rule is also very simple. All participants must acknowledge that the trip is temporary, and therefore acknowledge that all personal connection on a bus be superficial and anonymous. This is the demonstration of Chet’s savvy when it came to the three rule game. I try to bury myself in Chip Kidd, try to concentrate on a funny moment when a person in class demonstrates a word by signifying the word in its presentation. The fellow painstakingly made the word HOT out of match sticks and was given a C due to its inability to burn his finger when he touched it. The Professor threw him a Zippo lighter and told him to burn his project for an A. Not only did the student incinerate the project he worked so hard to achieve, but the glue he used exploded and left a large char on the wall of the cinder block classroom.

I couldn't pay attention. I was eavesdropping on the conversation that I knew I shouldn't be listening too. The problem was that his conversation was such a mammoth display of the power of anonymity it was hard not to listen to something I told myself not to listen too. Not two minutes after introducing himself as Chet, he puts his hand through his Mohawk and says “I’m sorry. My name is not Chet, it is Steve. I lie because I am insecure about myself and had a rough life growing up without a dad.” Lizzy, as it were, across the aisle, was enthralled with “Chet’s” "honesty" and continued on her smoke and mirrors rant about how so many people were shallow.

It’s one thing to be caught in a lie and have to tell someone that the person in question is not who he claims to be, but it seems that “Chet” had other things in mind. His idea was to burn the façade of what he was immediately to demonstrate a soft, scorched, vulnerable side, so that girls would like him and start a hasty romance that ends when the trip stops. This could only happen in the anonymous fling situation of the bus. Rule three was Chet’s advantage to take advantage of another person. It just so happened that Elisabeth was shallow enough to allow that advantage, or perhaps dying to be exploited by that advantage, to fall for such an obvious ploy. The flames consume the façade and they both get the A they wanted. The bus trip ended and Chet and Lizzy got off the bus hand in hand. Chet lit Lizzy’s cigarette with a Zippo and went on their way to the bus station restroom. Their time normalized while I still had 10 hours of a 5 hour bus ride to go. I finished my book, closed my eyes and reflected on the events of my travels. Perhaps in our anonymous selves, we have smoke damage of the corruptions that we want others not to see. We create illusions to demonstrate ourselves in one form, as well as metaphorical nicknames to demonstrate our seemingly unconscious desires, until we are touched by an observer that should not be looking at our faults by decree, but cannot resist. We are found to be false and then either burn away that falseness for our own credit, or allow it to take the form of the average everyday grade that is passed on to the people we meet. The final purpose of all of these illusions and monikers persists to create an illusion for ourselves to perceive the individual as more powerful than his faults and controller of his own destiny. This then contradicts itself in the practice of the flaws dictating how fast we progress along a highway of personal freedom and achievement of goals. It turns our claims of understanding liberty and freedom into understanding the boundaries of what is socially safe. We are afraid of ourselves and rely on the preservation of anonymity to spare us. The danger is that there are those among us who have learned to benefit from this dissonance and with that advantage, take what he wants from people who are sitting in the false security. Safety is at its core a social construct and leaves us ironically unsafe.

To sum up, Bus travel leaves way too much time to think about things. If ever given the chance to fly or go Greyhound, splurge on the coach seat. There is very little philosophy dealing with an hour flight there and back than a more than whole day’s worth of what should be a fourteen hour ride.