A Road Trip in Brains: Drabble

Did you know that mayonnaise is 5% milk?

Did you know that everyone has a unique tongueprint, as they do with fingerprints?

Did you know that the northern leopard frog swallows its prey using its eyes? (It uses them to help push food down its throat by retracting them into its head).

Did you know that Vladimir Nabokov nearly invented the smiley?

Did you know that there are 274 different types of dust?

Did you know that bacteria lives in hairspray and in 2008 a new one was discovered?

Did you know that there are around 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body? (If you took them all out and laid them end to end, they’d stretch around the world more than twice).

Did you know that there are more stars in space than there are grains of sand on every beach in the world? 

As the road stretched out ahead. Deep into the peat moss mire and moors of Connemara, twenty seven brains on a bus ramble down their own lanes.

Some of it was true. Some of it was not. Mostly though, the thoughts were much of nothing. Though that's just a limitation of the English language. Nothing is impossible to quantify. So what is all of this. Really?

I'm bored. When are we going to arrive. Is this even worth it? I'm hot. I can't sleep. I'm tired. This bus is rocky. Look a sheep! Those mountains are gorgeous. I have so much work to do. This is the middle of nowhere. I wonder what Jeremy is doing? Yellow car! What am I going to do tomorrow? I want a chocolate muffin. Should I have a muffin? This is a holiday. Nine-hundred and ninety-nine stars in the sky, the sun is burning. What do I have to do when I get back? Pretty stream. Where are my sunglasses? It's so hot.

On wanders the brains of the twenty seven passengers.

The brain belonging to the wire rimmed glasses and bohemian blue shirt chatters a Connemara stream's worth of gossip about the next door neighbours to the brain of the brown messy bun and sensible white shoes. They've been friends for thirty years.

Behind the two middle-aged brains sits the brain of the textbook version of freshmeat business. A twenty-something in a sharp jacket and jeans who holds the hand of a svelte model with a camera bigger than a swan's neck. Together they are caught in a duet of money and expectations of love.

Over to the left is the brain of a bouncy castle. Well, not literally, but the way the mind leaps from sheep to cloud to the curiousity of Connemara sunshine versus the mystery of mist blown moorlands, one wouldn't be wrong to deduce so.

The brain at the front of the bus is full of burden. Burden at bearing patience at the long journey ahead of which, despite the declared time of two hours before the bus began trekking, cannot see an end. And now the brain feels accute hunger and needs the toilet quite badly.

Which brain is the best? The most normal? The wisest? The smartest? But who are we to give definition? Brains are brains. Presently there is a total thirty-nine living in yellowed jars at the Victorian pathology museum of St Barthomew's hospital in London.

And that means, as far as anyone knows, we are all normal here.

Brains are brains.

So take the hands, take the stream, take the road that does not seem.

Far beyond the fallen skies, beyond the rolling hills. Find future sitting in the southern lands and fantasy through a lean-to.

Come count these brains of the twenty seven. All together come as one, many and none.

That is all. 

Remember then, when people come, kicking the sky down from overhead, normal is not a destination, it is a stream of thought, trapped between grocery lists and restaurant recipes. It is the brain chirping "yellow car" for the umteenth time, just because it can. Especially if present in a country known to have a regular dose of yellow vehicles for reasons still unknown.

What thoughts pass by on the rocky roads, rolling, won't fit into the cutout squares where peat moss sat for billions of years. No, its more likely these thoughts will wash downstream with the pins and coins, the bones and toys of days long past which melted deep into the earth as it grew and died, grew and died, over and over. Cementing the brains of humanity into the very earth itself.

Sink deeper now, into the sheets of dreamland.

Don't live normal. Live your story.