In my ongoing observations of natural phenomenae taking place in my own environment, I have gradually come to take notice of a pattern for which I have no explanation other than one tainted by medieval notions long since discounted in all other applications.
How is it that I can be standing at a bus stop waiting for a city bus and five, ten, seventeen minutes go by, then suddenly, with no other visible or auditory harbingers of approaching transport, people begin appearing at the bus stop in rapid succession and within minutes or even mere seconds the bus pulls up to the stop?
Not being a horribly illogical person, I have examined what I’d think would be the obvious conventional hypotheses, and rejected them as insufficiently explanatory for reasons as given below:
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[li]**The people appearing at the bus stop have the bus schedule and know exactly when to make their appearance. ** I often have my own bus schedule, and/or the bus schedule is posted on the little guide-and-map thingie on a pole at the bus stop. Despite that fact, I’ve stepped out with 2 minutes to spare before the next bus is due and waited five, ten, seventeen minutes and then suddenly five people appear and right then, hey, there’s the bus.[/li][li]The people who appear are locals who know the vagaries of local bus habits. But it happens outside my own building where I’m a local dammit and I don’t know any secrets so how do they? I’ve studied the bus’s routes and looked for patterns but still have to clue as to how to know when it’s seconds away from showing up.[/li][li]The people who suddenly appear were able to see the bus coming from indoors somewhere and came out only at that point. This is next to impossible outside our building. There’s nowhere to stand and watch from anywhere more convenient than the bus stop itself, except for the island in the middle of 1st Avenue.[/li][/list=a]
To compound the matter, I’ve made a diligent effort to study the people themselves, so as to ascertain whether or not they wait communally at a convenient but poorly-advertised “wait here comfortably sitting down and drinking refreshing beverages until the red light blinks which means the bus is seconds away from pulling up to the stop” kind of waiting spot or something. It is my observation that for any five of those who suddenly appear at the bus stop moments before the bus does, two will come from the east, one will come from around the corner to the north, one will appear to have just finished strolling the long block from the west, and one comes up from directly behind me when I’m not watching.
Of course, none of them were observably present until just a couple instants before the nose of the bus rolls to the intersection and signals to make a left-hand turn. Never do I see someone come out of the corner deli and look at a wrist-watch and then stroll over to the bus stop; never do I notice someone racing down the long block from the west, worried about missing the bus.
I’m thinking that I cannot continue to deny the evidence of my senses, even though the rationalist in me finds it revolting to put it into words and thus acknowledge the swirls of chaos wafting through the cracks in our everyday reality, but… ** I THINK THEY SIMPLY ARE NOT THERE UNTIL THERE IS AN APPROACHING BUS FOR THEM TO BOARD. ** Perhaps they congeal into corporeal presence from the air above the surface of the sidewalk’s concrete; perhaps in the interstitial spaces between apartment complexes, a threshold between our world and the domain of the bus-waiters opens briefly, they step through, and it closes behind them. This I do not know.
What may be more important in the long run is determining whether they disappear after disembarking from the bus farther down-route, thus preserving a sort of homeostatis, or if our world is becoming ever more densely populated as an ever-increasing body of bus-boarders joins us to reside permanently in our midst.
I did a google search and looked through the archives before posting this, but it seems that this topic has never been fully addressed.