Goodreads asked Tentatively, A Convenience:

What mystery in your own life could be a plot for a book?

Tentatively, A Convenience That's an interesting question. If I were to think about it longer, I might think of an answer replete with human drama & intrigue. Instead, I'll go with the 1st story that occurs to me:

In the early 1980s, I often took people into the roughly 2.5 mile long train tunnel that runs between the Maryland Institute College of Art's "Station Bullding", a former train station, to "Camden Yards", an industrial area that had not yet been converted into a sports stadium.

Near the southern, Camden Yards, end of the tunnel there was a group of what was then fairly new concrete-walled rooms that served ventilation purposes for the train tunnel. On the east side of the tunnel there was a rectangular hole in the tunnel wall that opened into this group of rooms. The hole started perhaps 6 or 7 feet off the tunnel floor. It was perhaps 15 feet wide & 6 feet high. This hole led into a stark room. To the right of the hole was a large grill that covered an industrial sized fan. Past the fan was a door leading to a hallway. Parallel to the hallway was the enclosure that contained the fan. At the fan enclosure's other end was another room that the hallway also opened into. This room had another grill as its 'ceiling', a grill that was located in a medium strip surrounded on either side by a busy highway at ground level. The fan was intended to be activated whenever a train went through. The idea was that the fan would help ventilate train fumes to the outer air. There was one other hallway/room on the other side of the fan enclosure from the hallway already mentioned & from the final venting room. This housed various control panels. Even though the whole installation was only a few years old it, apparently, no longer worked.

I used this area a fair amount because I found it a fantastic environment. One of the movies I made there is called "Tunnel T.Ore & Tiger" & can be witnessed on Vimeo here: https://vimeo.com/160516148 . Aside from graffiti. my friends & I didn't alter the space, we never vandalised the equipment, e.g..

One day there had been a substantial thunder-storm. It might've been shortly after this storm ended that I took 3 friends of mine into the tunnel & into this group of rooms. My friends, if I remember correctly, were George & Cheryl & Claire. We had all eaten consciousness-expanding mushrooms. George & Cheryl & I had walked through the hallway from the room that vented to the outdoors into the room that vented from the tunnel. Claire was right behind us. Apparently, the concrete floor was somewhat slanted because there was a pool of water accumulated, maybe 3 inches deep, at the end of the room that we went into.

As the 3 of us entered the room we looked in the direction of where the fan was & saw what appeared to be a form of electricity or lightning moving in what appeared to be perfectly geometrical dashes from the ceiling & then making a seemingly exact right angle turn - back & forth. The 3 of us stared, shocked, & didn't say anything. The room was otherwise extremely dark.

After what was presumably less than a minute of this one or the other of us broke the silence to exclaim something to the effect of: "Do you see that lightning?!" At this point, the geometrical dashes of lightning made another right-angle turn in the direction of the vent hole into the tunnel & turned left to go into the tunnel in the direction of Camden Yards. We clambered up onto the vent wall & caught a glimpse of it rapidly disappearing from our sight - going in a straight line made up of dashes.

As I recall, it was at this point that Claire entered the room. As such, it seemed to me that she couldn't have seen the electricity. She later claimed, however, that she, too, had seen it.

We very excitedly compared what we'd seen & all agreed that we'd seen the same thing. I, at least, had had the hypothesis that the lightning, or geometrical electricity, had been following pipes leading down from the ceiling. However, by whatever light we could muster, perhaps a lighter, we saw that there were no pipes extruding from the ceiling that the electricity could have followed where I expected them. There was, however, a pipe IN the ceiling - presumably venting to the ground level air, but maybe not. That was, apparently, where the geometrical lightning had originated from. Its further passage in dashes & straight lines had no other visible sign of a channel to direct it.

Our collective impression was that whatever we had seen had been intelligent & that we had startled it with our noise - scaring it away.

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