PackageByStranger.com

The Almighty Conveyance

OK, this idea is exactly 4 minutes old, one of those fresh-out-of-the-oven, half-baked ideas that is too young to go out by itself, too young to have done anything wrong,

Walt Disney Dreamed in a carousel of color, but my slide is stuck in the bright lights and melting, like that deer frozen immobile, unable to move. I am soon to be have venison in the front seat. After I get out I might be thinking of Walt, I might not.

Down here where I live, with the cast-outs, mixed-ups and single moms, you will sometimes see human intelligence, born of laziness, that it so complete that restores your faith both in the future and in humanity.

Tonight, was such a time. It was something I had seen a hundred times before - okay ten - but this time it registered:

In our complex, the dumpsters runneth over, and they are far far away. So you can either give a kid the bag of trash, which won't make it to the dumpster, or you can heave it there by slinging it over your shoulde and starting the long walk. Most people don't sling it over their shoulder, especially in the abundance of child labor. Freeze Frame: The kid with trashbag in tow gets most of the way to the dumpster and if the tissue thin bag hasn't ripped on the asphalt, the kid suddenly figures out that there is no way they can slam dunk the trash into a metal shipping container that is eleven feet high. Wilt Chamberlain had 25000 women. Michael Jordon played major league ball. This sack of trash is going nowhere. So instead the kid leaves the juicy chicken and bacon drippings in front of the dumpster where the raccoons, skunks and creatures can get in and go wild waiting for the next mutation from Satan

Some people, even in the ghetto however, are conscientious and want the trash to actually get to the dumpster and from that comes the light-bulb-genesis of an idea that will solve tomorrow's package delivery problems with one fell swoop. I call it: PackageByStranger.com

Not to delay getting to the point but I forgot to tell you what the smart thing was. Some of the All-I-Want-To-Do-Is-Have-Some-Fun good people of the complex pile their trash bags on the hood or trunk of their cars and roll the whole package to the dumpster without taking even a single unassisted step. This bit of urban laziness shows how deeply wired human ingenuity really is.

Essential non-sequiter:

In our cities, which are really package data flow networks, or cellular automata trading progress for the passing of tokens posing as cars, we have a significant package delivery problem. Whenever you order something off the internet, and it comes to your house, some poor slob of a UPS guy who is going to night school or building duck calls in his spare time, has to get in his truck and deliver your selfish box full of foam, cardboard and eco-crap directly to your door like you are the president of the United States or something. While I like feeling presidential as much as the next guy, driving a UPS truck through the wind at 60 MPH (em pee aecha) with a frontal area of 96 square feet creates a constant need to explore the north shore and the Ayatollah's back yard for yet more deposits of foreign oil, not to mention the inconvenience having to put a partially finished duck call back on the bench.

Now each house that I know of has water lines, electricity lines, gas lines, phone lines and cableTV lines as inputs, and sewer lines and garbage cans as outputs. Now we do a great job of getting inputs into our houses, but after we have eaten, pissed and moaned, we do an absolutely moronic job of getting our entropy-ridden, uncompacted, nonrenewable garbage out.

When I went to Disneyland and saw Walt's Dream of the year 2000 there was a monorail, and a people mover. Walt had it right on moving people, but we need to move stuff too.

Imagine in front of your house a big conveyor belt that brings everything, your groceries, your patio furniture, your number-5 fly-tying kit, every commodity to your house. And then after you eat and piss and moan, you put your garbage out on it. No delivery trucks or grocery trips required. All worship the Almighty Conveyance.

The Almighty Conveyance is an idea I have had for several years, but I never could see myself convincing people to put a conveyor belt in front of their white picket fences. Besides, where I live, people might help themselves to your conveyances before they reached their official destination.

So then I thought, "We could bury the Almighty Conveyance" sewer pipe style so that all that stuff could just roll underground on a pneumatic rail car like Pierce Brosnan and Electra King do in "The World Is Not Enough". But then if somebody's patio furniture were to get stuck in the tube, it could be a major problem.

This is where putting the garbage bag on hood or trunk of the car and driving it to the dumpster becomes so attractive.

Let's say you logged into a web site called PackageByStranger.com and told the web site where you lived and where you work. Then in exchange for free gas, hockey tickets or new rims you could deliver somebody else's package without lifting a finger. Oh, I just love this idea. It would be just like eBay. It would be the self-serve gas for the Y2K.

Back to the point. Let's say you have a package that you want to go somewhere in your city. You log into PackageByStranger.com and ask it, "who should I give my package to". Then the web site says, "Go two doors down and knock three times", just like Keanu Reeves does in that movie where the leather clad chick beats the crap out of the police just for fun. Then that neighbor you never met tells you to, "follow the white rabbit", which means that old Volkswagen parked in spot 46a. You take your package to 46a and give the security guard that, "I'm supposed to be here" sort of package delivery look and then put your box squarely under the rear wheels of the white rabbit because that's the code. This tells the owner of the car they are supposed to carry your package. You then leave in confidence knowing that through the miracle of the internet you have nothing else to worry about.

Each hour spent on the website PackageByStranger.com entitles you to a free six-pack of tracking devices, one of which you carefully placed inside your package. This enables you to see that your box has been run over in the parking lot twelve times, but the transponder still works and it continues to beep faithfully as your package is heaved into the dumpster on pickup day.

- Van