Greyhound
I used to ride the Greyhound to get to conventions and to go on other trips. I once was on a bus going from Jacksonville, Florida, to Washington DC. It was an overnight trip, a long, grueling overnight trip. The buses always get strangely quiet when the night settles in. All you can hear is the rumbling of the engines and rush of things passing by in the darkness on the other side of the window. When you go through a city, all you'll see is lighted billboards, chain signs, and other neon emblems of corporate America.

On that trip from Florida to Washington DC, I tried to sleep. But I would often wake up long enough to see the pavement roaring past underneath us and the same signs float past. I blinked in and out like this over some eight or twelve hours, and then it dawned on me as the sun was coming up:

It's like this everywhere. It's the same signs, same pavement, same world. I can't escape it. It's the same same same. The lights go down, and the people go home, but the truckers and buses keep going. The lights come on, and every day the same dance start all over again. Get in cars, go to work, eat food, go home to bed. The same same same. It's an oiled machine that just grinds on and on. How much of this country is paved? How much land has been covered by crappy chain stores that bring us crappy food or crappy goods? Morning comes, the machine fires up, it brings profit to the ones who own it, and we blindly go about our lives as though ours was the only KFC and Walmart in the world. We feel content because we bought some thing that crawled its way up the highway into our arms or because we had a particularly satisfying meal that came from a freezer compartment on an eighteen wheeler supplying the same dinner to every other Applebee's on the eastern seaboard.

That one night on the Greyhound, when I covered all that ground between the south and north but couldn't tell one town from the next, had a very strong effect on me, although I'm not sure what effect that was.