Buddy the Gourd!

The spaghetti parks

April 16, 2012

Something sort of backwards happens in the near future. When people want to go long distances they no longer head for the skies and when traveling around locally they no longer get in their cars and drive around on the ground.

Not sure what happened. There are some rumors about a tire lobbyist missing a payment -- not sure what that means. But in any case, the country has been covered over with high speed train lines. If a person (or gourd) wants to go from say, Minneapolis to Chicago, they can hop on a high speed train and be there in under 2 hours. Go all of the way to the east coast and Atlantic City in a few hours more. Everyone loves it. No more loud planes overhead. Neighborhoods are quiet.

And in a strange reversal, people needing to take short trips get in their quiet jet propelled energy cars that travel at about 45 feet off the ground -- just above the tree lines. These cars are great and have answered a crying need of the citizens for the chance to blaze their own trails. Reports are they'd felt very hemmed in by the existing streets and traffic lights. Imagine being told to stop just when you're getting up some nice velocity.

With the new vehicles that travel in the air, there is no need to plow roads after a snow storm, repair potholes, or suffer through road construction; it's simply terrific! And with the new go anywhere anytime GPS navigation systems, no one needs to use the roads to guide them to their destination. Just set in a course and make a bee-line for your end goal. If someone is in your path, just go up or down to avoid them.

In the early days, there were some collisions as drivers both went up or down to avoid the other vehicle and then ran directly into each other. Now vehicles have giant + or - signals to indicate whether they're planning to go up or down. This has helped a lot.

Parking is less of a problem now too. When you reach your destination, you can simply tether your car to the ground and turn on local vehicle weightlessness and your car floats up and out of the way. Just pull on the rope or use the remote control to bring your car safely down when you're ready to go.

So what about the spaghetti parks? I'm getting to that. Once everyone started taking the fast trains and flying local cars, the giant interstate system was no longer needed. Well it was kept up for a while, out of habit and obligation to those who cared. But as the highways grew quiet, plants starting sprouting through cracks in the concrete. More and more so. More cracks and more plants, followed by even more cracks and plants.

Finally one day, someone looked at all of the vegetation that had taken over the highways and came to the obvious conclusion. Spaghetti parks! Long narrow parks that criss-cross the nation. Soon initiatives were launched to cooperate with the plants and help remove the concrete, making it easier for the plants to flourish. Vegetable gardens were planted to help provide food for people in the neighborhood.

People sending messages from the moon colonies have said that when they look out at the earth through a telescope it's looks like a big bowl of green spaghetti noodles, because of the new parks and gardens.

The whacky bicyclists who love to ride all day, are the only ones now who use these spaces to travel across the country. Otherwise the parks are filled with children eating ice cream while holding their parent's hand, young people playing a game of soccer off to the side, coffee bars, strolling lanes and the occasional butterfly. Some frogs. Birds. Bees. It's an exciting and wonderful turn of events.

best,
your pal,
Buddy the Gourd

- Posted by Buddy at 8:04 PM