as ashley and i continued rebuilding our relationship in indianapolis, something else was beginning to take shape.

the images from los angeles had never entirely left me. i could still remember the sidewalks, the makeshift shelters, and the people lying so motionless that i couldn’t determine whether they were sleeping or dead. what remained particularly unsettling was the uncertainty, that terrible distance between recognizing another human being might need help and knowing what to do about it.

i had spent much of my professional life designing systems intended to reduce unnecessary friction. i’d developed software that could recognize uncertainty, direct information toward human review, and make complicated processes easier for people to navigate. i’d learned to examine an experience from the perspective of the person using it, rather than simply accepting the assumptions of the institution providing it.

yet when i reflected on what i’d witnessed in los angeles, i kept returning to an uncomfortable question: why did accessing something as fundamental as food, hygiene, shelter, or medical attention so often require people already experiencing extraordinary difficulties to navigate even more complexity?

the question wasn’t entirely new.

years earlier, while living in atlanta, i’d imagined a concept called *soapy wheels*, a bus converted into a mobile shower facility for people without dependable access to bathing. i had hoped one of my former partners might help bring the idea to life, but she wasn’t interested in pursuing it, and the concept remained largely unrealized.

at the time, it was a practical idea informed by a familiar design instinct. if people couldn’t easily reach a service, perhaps the service could be redesigned to reach them.

but my experiences in los angeles had changed how i understood the significance of that possibility.

a shower was no longer simply a shower. it represented privacy, physical comfort, dignity, and an opportunity to experience a measure of normalcy amid circumstances that could make even ordinary routines extraordinarily difficult.

and the same principle seemed applicable to countless other needs.

what if retired city buses could become mobile environments offering food, hygiene, rest, healthcare access, and essential resources? what if technology could help people navigate complicated service systems without requiring them to understand the institutional machinery operating behind those services? what if care were designed around the circumstances of the person who needed it rather than the convenience of the organization providing it?

i began imagining an interconnected ecosystem in which each component addressed a particular need while participating in a larger, more coherent experience.

and when the idea became too expansive to remain confined to my imagination, i returned to the language i’d understood since childhood.

lego.

i began purchasing bricks and constructing the vehicles i’d been imagining. an eatbus, a sleepbus, a washbus, and a carebus gradually emerged, each with its own purpose, configuration, and relationship to the larger system.

i wasn’t following instructions or reproducing models designed by someone else. i was inventing the vehicles, their interiors, and the environments in which they might operate.

what began as a collection of seemingly unrelated bricks gradually acquired structure and purpose. each component could be moved, examined, modified, or replaced as the design evolved. the process allowed me to experiment with possibilities that would have been prohibitively expensive to explore at full scale.

i could consider how someone might enter a bus, move through its interior, access a service, preserve their privacy, or connect with another resource. the models allowed me to think about individual environments and the relationships between them simultaneously.

the same fascination with order, compatibility, and possibility that had delighted me as a child had become an instrument for designing human-care infrastructure.

eventually, i started carrying the models into meetings.

there is something wonderfully unconventional about walking into a room full of executives, administrators, and institutional leaders with a case of children’s building bricks and expecting them to take your ideas seriously.

but i had learned that imagination becomes considerably easier to communicate when another person can interact with it.

i’d place the miniature buses on the table, explain their intended functions, and invite the person across from me to pick one up. they could examine its interior, turn it around, and begin understanding how a retired transit vehicle might become something entirely different.

the conversation changed when the idea was physically present.

i no longer had to rely exclusively on elaborate descriptions of a system that didn’t yet exist.

someone could hold it in their hands.

as time passed, i purchased more lego, constructed additional environments, and refined the relationships between the components. what began as a handful of vehicles gradually became a model of an entire operating ecosystem.

the bricks became my business plan, my map, my anchor, and one of the most effective ways i had to communicate a vision that otherwise seemed difficult to comprehend.

during that same period, another relationship was becoming important to my life.

i had grown to admire the founding pastor of our church, a man whose wisdom, patience, gentleness, and quiet strength represented qualities i was learning to value differently than i had in the past.

i approached him with an idea for developing a podcast around his books and work. the opportunity to contribute appealed to me, but i was also deeply uncertain of my worth, particularly in the presence of someone i respected so much.

i remember arriving at our meeting wearing one of my two pairs of pants and a worn-out shirt. those were modest material circumstances, but what weighed on me more heavily was the history i carried.

i had been a public figure whose unconventional family life had unfolded on national television. i knew the associations people might make, the judgments they might hold, and the questions my past could raise.

i wasn’t sure why he would want to work with me.

at our next meeting, i brought the lego models and introduced him to reversebus.

as i explained the buses, the services, and the system i was imagining, i found myself doing something i’d become accustomed to doing during that period: questioning whether someone genuinely wanted to be associated with me.

“i’m a heathen who was showing his ass on national television,” i’d tell him.

he responded with kindness and reassurance, encouraging me not to allow the judgments of others to determine my worth.

what mattered wasn’t that he possessed some magical ability to resolve my circumstances. he didn’t restore my finances, undo the past, or guarantee that my family would become whole again.

he gave me an opportunity to contribute.

i began helping develop his podcast and website, drawing upon technical and creative abilities i’d spent years acquiring but had nearly forgotten how to value.

there was something deeply restorative about being trusted with meaningful work when i was struggling to recognize anything worthwhile in myself.

i was reminded that my past did not eliminate my capacity to contribute, even as i remained responsible for confronting the harm i’d caused.

at home, the process of rebuilding with ashley continued requiring a kind of patience that didn’t come naturally to me. i was learning that repairing trust could not be approached like engineering a complicated system, where every component could be rearranged until the desired outcome emerged.

relationships demanded respect for another person’s autonomy, consistency between words and behavior, and a willingness to accept that genuine change could not be demonstrated through intention alone.

meanwhile, reversebus continued developing.

the lego models gave way to the difficult practical work of acquiring vehicles, designing interiors, identifying service requirements, building partnerships, and navigating the financial and institutional realities of operating something unfamiliar.

an idea that could be reconfigured in minutes on my table now encountered building codes, insurance requirements, procurement delays, funding constraints, and organizations whose established procedures weren’t necessarily designed to accommodate unconventional solutions.

it was a very different kind of complexity.

and, in some respects, a far more demanding one.

today, reversebus is developing an ecosystem that includes carebus, freevend, showerpod, laundrypod, reversepod, and guidepath os. redesigned vehicles, modular infrastructure, no-cost essential resources, and guided digital navigation are intended to work together to make care easier to reach and less burdensome to access.

the organization remains