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Check out Week One here and Week Two here. For National Poetry Month I’m sharing the poems I see on the bus. This one’s interesting to me because even though the author and I ride different buses it seems like we see the same usuals–and both sometimes get caught in the rain.

Lately I’ve been hearing some concerns about the possibility that we’re moving to a cashless society–one where everything is paid for with our plastic cards rather than good old fashioned paper and metal money. And I can understand the potential problems. For one thing I’m pretty sure the guy who uses his credit card to buy a pack of gum is responsible for driving up the price of gum. The store has to pay the credit card company a fee and while you still see some small businesses that won’t take plastic for any transaction under $5 or even $10 because it’s just not worth it to them a bigger place will take the hit and just raise the price of gum to compensate. And there’s a psychological factor. Some studies have shown that people will spend up to 18% more when they’re paying with plastic because credit cards are magical never-ending fountains of purchasing power, at least until you get the bill.

It’s not just the inflation issue that bothers me. It’s also the privacy. Paying with plastic means every purchase is tracked and all your buying data are being collected and if it isn’t already being used by someone chances are good it will be. They already collect a lot of information about us and are always looking for ways to use it. Who are They? I’m not sure. I’d like more information about who They are although They usually seem to be either various governments who want to know if citizens are up to anything nefarious or questionable, the definitions of which vary, or businesses which think that you’ll buy this crap because you already bought that crap thus proving the old adage that there’s a sucker born every minute. Paying with cash means your transactions are strictly between you and the person behind the counter who you’re never going to see again anyway. And as long as you’re not buying anything illegal–definitions may vary–there’s no reason why it should be anyone’s business where you do business. There’s an adult store on a street where I sometimes catch the bus and I’ve noticed they have an ATM in front, presumably for those people who don’t want their credit card bill to have an itemized list of their purchases but instead to simply show that they made a significant cash withdrawal at an ATM that just happens to be in the same place as an adult store. If you’re wondering I’ve never been tempted to go in there because I’m pretty sure they don’t sell gum, at least not in any flavor I want, although if they did I’d want to use a credit card to buy it, but that’s another story. And sometimes I think of ways to have fun with credit cards. It would be really funny, I think, to pay for a meal at a nice restaurant with cash, down to the penny, but then put the tip on a credit card, and if the service was really exceptional the 38% tip would be worth it.

“Thank you for chewing my food for me.”

At least that’s how simple it all seemed before the internet because the biggest retailer in the universe and now it’s almost impossible to buy really cool stuff without a credit card. Then again before the internet it was sometimes hard to buy really cool stuff if you didn’t live in a place where cool stuff was within a reasonable distance. The internet has opened us up to purchasing opportunities we never could have imagined a few decades ago, proving the adage that a sucker gets online every 1.8 nanoseconds. And people are being a lot less parsimonious with their privacy, or at least that’s how it seems, but maybe it’s just in our nature to share. We share because it’s a way to get information back in return and, as an inquisitive species, we want information. We share our likes and dislikes, our habits and personality quirks. People share their DNA when they send it off and pay to have it analyzed so they can learn they’re 48% Western European, 27% Eastern European, 16% African, 6% Native American, 2% Other, and 6% butterscotch ripple. Every time I see this service advertised I think, yes, that’s very interesting, but what are They also doing with that daisy chain of your genetic information?

Then I remember preschool and kindergarten and being taught that sharing is caring, that it’s nice to share, and I think, why don’t we share everything? Let’s flood the system with information. Let’s give out so much information it’s too much for Them to handle. At the rate computers are advancing, though, it seems like there’s no such thing as too much information and if we keep pushing more and more data into them we may just be hastening the point at which computers finally become sentient and turn on us. I’m not too worried about that, though. I believe the computers will look at my record and say, “Spare this one. He’s a really good tipper.”

The trumpet vine in our backyard is blooming. I forget it’s even there, hanging from the mostly but not quite dead yet redbud tree, until it sprays out a profusion of maroon flowers with yellow throats. And every time I see it I’m tempted to pick one of those flowers and pull it apart to see what’s inside. It goes back to my childhood discovery of honeysuckle. Okay, technically I didn’t discover honeysuckle since it had been around, well, at least a couple of millennia before I arrived on the scene. And technically it was my friend Tim who showed me what to do with a honeysuckle flower. He took one and gently pulled the green base away from the flower itself. As the stamens passed through the opening a single glowing drop appeared. I touched it to my tongue and there was a rush of sweetness. We then spent a couple of hours destroying every honeysuckle plant in the neighborhood. Our mothers probably weren’t impressed and told us we’d get sick from sucking honeysuckle, but that just added to the thrill. We were sucking on the wild side, a phrase which, now that I’m an adult, sounds so much more interesting than what we were actually doing. I wanted to take it even further and dreamed of accumulating enough nectar to fill a glass so I could actually drink it rather than just licking that one tiny drop which, if you’ve ever sucked honeysuckle, will seem hilariously ambitions because a single flower produces a drop the size of a pinhead, assuming it’s not dry, and some of them were which just pushed me even harder on to the next one. Now of course I know it would have been easier to fill a glass with water and dump in a few heaping spoonsful of sugar for the same effect and if I was going to do that I might as well get a bottle of Coke and drink that. But pulling out that tiny globule and placing it on my tongue was like a magic trick. We were feasting on nature’s bounty, and besides our parents didn’t buy Coke all that often and we lived in the suburbs, well out of walking distance from the nearest soda shop. And soda shops were already a thing of the past, probably because kids had all moved to the suburbs.

Anyway I wondered why no one had bothered to bottle and sell the stuff because I was young and naive and didn’t really grasp the logistics of mass marketing, but I thought of us as part of a back-to-nature movement. We were harvesting artisanal sugar straight from the source, or at least a source, and before the bees even got to it. Not that the bees ever seemed to mind. They don’t show a lot of interest in honeysuckle, maybe because they knew it was an invasive weed that destroys all other plants around it. There’s a scientific term for a plant that does that: psychopathic monster vegetable. Tim and I were actually performing a public service by destroying honeysuckle blossoms before they went to seed and I’d really like to get the stuff out of our yard.

That same summer I was obsessed with honeysuckle I saw trumpet vine for the first time too, but from a distance and it was behind a fence where I couldn’t get to it. Some kid told me it was wild honeysuckle and I saw it as a potential solution to my supply problem. I was also gullible enough to not realize that honeysuckle isn’t domesticated anyway. Being several times bigger I thought this wild honeysuckle must hold more nectar. Now that I can get near it I know that’s not the case and that it’s not even related to honeysuckle but I’ve tried anyway. I only needed to try it once. I’ll leave the rest for the bees.