let’s get awesome

Next week I’m taking a Greyhound bus 3.5 days from New York to Seattle. These days it’s cheaper and faster to fly (although Greyhound tickets are still possible to forge, I think). I’m taking this trip because I want to make a film about a cross-country bus ride. These 3000 miles are a kind of research for the film– a way to ‘find’ the story.

I’m fascinated by the intersections of people and the temporary intimacy and how utterly American the bus is in a non-Patriot Act, non-flag-waving kind of way. On the bus that it becomes very apparent who is fighting the United States’ wars, who is being criminalized, incarcerated, institutionalized. It’s on the bus that I’ve met Vietnam vets, fresh faced army-recruits en route to basic training, and folks just out of prison– as well as retired bureaucrats, English teachers, and entire families on their way to weddings and funerals. It’s on the bus that I’ve divulged secrets about myself that almost no one else knows– and it’s on the bus that I’ve listened to the most intimate confessions of strangers whom I’ll never meet again.

Of course, I know it’s not all romantic and gushy like I’ve just described. It’s uncomfortable and stinky and boring and people are annoying and loud and the only hot food around is Arby’s and McDonalds…and sometimes you just don’t want to talk to your neighbor or they don’t want to talk to you, so you both just watch the landscape of the interstate roll by or stand awkwardly under the florescent lights of a rest stop stop in Elk City, Oklahoma smoking cigarettes at 3:00 A.M.. But I think that’s part of it too.

Everyone I talk to about this film project gets excited to share their own amazing story about riding the bus. It’s pretty universal. So, I’m making a zine of these stories. And I’d love yours to be part of it.

The only requirement is that your story be about an experience you had riding a Greyhound bus (or some other U.S./Canada-based bus line).

Write about the time you had to wait in the station for 13 hours. What about the time someone got drunk and belligerent in the back seats and the driver tried, unsuccessfully, to throw them off? The 8-hour love affair you had on the way to Cleveland? Or when you woke up as the sun was rising over the Rocky Mountains and your neighbor, the soft-spoken 70-year old train conductor, was leaned gently up against you, still asleep. Or write about the boredom, or the time you scammed your way across the country with a fake ticket. Anything related goes. Please forward this email to others who have stories to tell.

I’m also looking for art and illustrations that are on topic.

Please let me know if you’re interested and email (or mail) all stories / art to me by April 16th. I’m going to be compiling and laying out that following week.

toddchandler [at] gmail.com
Todd Chandler
17 Dikeman Street
Brooklyn, NY 11231

Thanks. Happy trails.

XO

photos by:
Steven Bao
Henk and Anna