One of the most challenging things about researching the ridiculous hoboes on John Hodgman's list of 700 is finding corroborating sources. These men and women hiked and rode the nation's rails as much as ninety years ago and rarely left any offspring, so eyewitness accounts are few and far between. Finding more than one person who remembers the same hobo from the list is a feat which I have only managed once, and with endlessly frustrating results.
I had only one hour in a nursing home cafeteria with the Trixies, and I was unable to give either of them a copy of Hodgman's list of 700 names prior to our meeting, so I spent way too much of that precious time reading the list aloud, as fast as I could. Trixie of the East had heard of Ol' Barb Stab-you-quick, but Trixie of the West had not. Zaxxon Galaxian was familiar only to Trixie of the West, and so on.
I was well past number 650 when I found one that they both knew. His name was Uranus John, the Star-Traveler. Trixie of the East had accompanied him and a group of hoboes from New York to St. Louis, in the summer of 1938.
"He got his hobo moniker from a bully named Günter, who loved to say 'Uranus.' The 'Star-Traveler' part was about his navigational skills. He had been a junior navigation officer in Hoover's secret hobo navy in 1932, and had a gift for using the stars and planets to guide him from place to place. It came in handy, even on land. Hoboes didn't just ride trains, you know. We walked for miles on end, through the middle of nowhere--"
Trixie of the West interrupted with a bang of her tiny old fist on the arm of her wheelchair.
"That ain't it! That ain't it at all! He was a dual-hobo," she said. "He roamed the American plains, but his time here was just a pause in his real journey - through the stars. He came from some faraway world - he said it was green, and a lot like earth - and he was marooned here, waiting for our industry to mature to the point where he could obtain something he called 'electronics,' to repair his damaged starship."
Trixie of the East grumbled, and West shooshed her with a hiss and a few wags of her bony finger.
"Of course no one believed him. So many hoboes were touched in the head, and there was as much opium in the west as there was lint, but I bought his story - I really did. He talked about wormholes and time dilation and inverse gravitational dropkick tunnels in such exquisite detail. Also, he got so very sad, when he spoke of his true home. He said that, even with his advanced spaceship, he couldn't avoid the pitfalls of relativistic velocity. He explained that when he had set out from his home world for 'a quick errand,' as he called it, our planet - our entire solar system - had not even begun to form."
"What depressed him so was knowing that his world and the star it orbited were already long-dead, or certainly would be, by the time he would be able to return. Apparently, hopping from star to star for a few decades, as he had, took upwards of a billion years, to something stationary, relatively speaking. The price that star-travelers pay, he said."
"I found him deeply unsettling to be around. His eyes were so odd. It was as if you could see in them the vastness of what he had seen, and the interminable time his travels had consumed. I mean, worlds were born, lived, and died in the time it took him to get from there to here." Trixie of the West shuddered, and pulled at her tattered hobo shawl.
The Trixies began to argue, talking over each other with increasingly-shrill insistence. My hour was up, anyway. A pair of kindly Jamaican-accented nurses came into the lunch room and wheeled the old hobo women away. I stood and thanked them for their time, but I don't think they heard me.
I was left with these two stories - one short and relatively unremarkable, and the other sounding like the elevator pitch for a new low-budget Playstation game.
How will I choose...
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| Relativistic Velocity |
Here we go again with the writing prompts from STUDIO 30-PLUS. I've been hoping for something spacey, to combine with this hobo name from the John Hodgman list, and this week's prompt was perfect - "stars." It was plucked from fellow blogger Laura's post, NEWBORN. Please take a minute to check out her work - this is a big part of why I'm here. "Newborn" is a sweet little morsel, but do read on - she is indeed a fine writer with a clean, clear voice.
Joe: If you could have one superpower, what would it be and why?
[Maris]: I didn't know you were recording. I thought you were going to take notes.
Joe: This is instead of taking notes. I'll delete it when I'm done.
[Maris]: I want... to be invisible. So that no one would see me.
Joe: That is how it usually... Okay - so why would you like to be invisible?
[Maris]: So I could run around and do what I want and people couldn't find me. And no one could see me. And I could go where I want and do what I want and be what I want and I could eavesdrop on everybody's conversations!
Joe: So, you wanna hear what other people are saying about you when you're not around?
[Maris]: Yes! And what they're saying about other people when I'm not around.
Joe: What if it's bad?
[Maris]: Maybe E.S.P. would be good... No, I'd rather be invisible... I don't care if it's bad - that's why I wanna know.
Joe: So, what else do you want to do besides hear what people are saying about you?
[Maris]: Do stuff without anybody talking to me.
Joe: Like... shopping?
[Maris]: I don't know - just get stuff done.
Joe: So basically, the power that you really want is the power to be... not bothered.
[Maris]: Yes! Cone of silen-- No, not cone of silence...
Joe: Cone of invisibility.
[Maris]: Mmm...
Joe: So... Not so much invisibility so that you can like, steal stuff, or sneak into the boys' locker room, but just so you can... be left alone.
[Maris]: Yes. Just so I can be nosy and hear stuff without having to talk to people.
Joe: Okay.
[Maris]: 'Cause no one understands me anyway, and everyone misinterprets everything I say, so it'd be easier just to chop that out of the equation altogether.
Joe: So it would be like existing, without all the hassle of having others know that you exist. Practically like how I live now, only without...
[Maris]: Guilt...
Joe: The pissing-off of others that frequently comes with being me.
[Maris]: Mm-hm.
Joe: You get to exist without being bothered. Okay.
[Maris]: And your superpower?
Joe: Well... I wanted to be able to go really, really, really fast, um... without time-dilation, because I'd like to see nebulas and-- nebuli?
[Maris]: Nebulasses!
Joe: Nemeses... Um, and other galaxies and pulsars and stuff like that...
[Maris]: That's much more interesting...
Joe: ...without-- and then be able to come back and tell you about it - or we could both go - without coming back to earth and finding it a charred cinder. 'Cause you know, sucky as it is, it's... home.
[Maris]: That's much more fun.
Joe: But that's kind of a superpower that requires other superpowers to make it work. You can't just go fast. You have to also be able to...
[Maris]: Breathe...
Joe: Yeah. And be safe from outer space and have air and food and whatnot. So, basically it's the power of infinitely-fast space travel without time-dilation... OR... Time-travel! Time-travel would be good.
[Maris]: Especially if you're invisible.
Joe: Yeah - the invisibility thing - that's pretty tempting, too. Although I think if I heard what people said about me when I wasn't around, I wouldn't like it.
[Maris]: Well, not just about me. I just want to hear what's going on, because people don't tell me stuff, so this way I could find out stuff that I might need to know.
Joe: If you could combine time-travel and invisibility, you could go back and see what really happened at critical and controversial historical events, like the JFK assassination. Find out what really happened. Or, like what my best friend really did with Jenny that night when I was passed out, and...
[Maris]: Invent Google. Or Marilyn.
Joe: Marilyn?
[Maris]: What killed her.
Joe: Oh. Well, I assume Jedgar killed her.
[Maris]: She was a danger to the Presidency.
Joe: HA! . . . This is getting stupid . . . Anyway, so there you go...
[Maris]: Well, teleportation would be really awesome, because then you wouldn't have to commute.
Joe:
[Maris]: I would like a superpower to be able to make myself look like whatever I wanted to.
Joe: Like shape-shifting?
[Maris]: Yes. It could be... I could transform into someone else...
Joe: I could shape-shift into Scarlett Johansson.
[Maris]: Um. Well, yeah. You could.
Joe: Well, you know . . . for you.
[Maris]: Uh-huh.
Joe: That would be fun.
[Maris]: Or the power to heal yourself.
Joe: (sigh)
[Maris]: The superpower to keep yourself young, fit and beautiful - but not age - but not have people notice that you're not aging, so you'd have to shift into, you know, someone younger. And then create identities, so they didn't lock you up.
Joe: (snort) Um... That's a pretty hefty superpower. If you can't explain your superpower in just a few words... It's kind of like Enron. If you can't say in a sentence or two what you do, then you're probably illegal. Huh. So, okay... You basically just want omnipotence.
[Maris]: Yeah. Omnipotence. ..
