So a car pulls up to my roadside booth. Well, not a car, a truck. One of these spotless, quad-cab luxury trucks, where the person wanted the blue-collar, masculine signifier of a vehicle made for haulin' the leaden bric-a-brac of industry from one towering human accomplishment to the next, but also wanted Sirius, OnStar, gratis ass-warmers thrown in with the rust-proofing. The kind of car that would suggest your foreman is making fun of you if the middle class weren't so painfully earnest about their humble self-mythology. Deadly serious. $20,000 Harley Davidsons are sold everyday so that people can nod along to Woody Guthrie tunes and make legends of their own self-determination.
A hammy face is looming over the wheel. Not in the Jerry Lewis sense of hammy, but in that this face suggests the same generous portions, wide open pastures, and unhurried cultivation that makes for a robust slab of humane certified pighaunch. This is a mean thing to say, yes. Aging is just unkind. We'll see what pork product I resemble in fifteen years and see if I think it's so goddamn funny then, but in the interim, here's this man of leisure with some designer thoughts about the Rugged Prairie Living he's doing, in all his pink succulence.
And me, I'm no better. I mean, I like to tell myself here's this fucko in the pretentious car, lost to the howling dregs of the world, a chemical peel for a wife, a yelping genetic sadness for a dog, but I own a jacket with epaulettes. Like I'm in the army. Or Kajagoogoo. There's no excuse for that. And as cars arrive at my tollbooth I'm up my ass with an insufferable self-mythology of my own, reading my Important Book of Great Truth and Art. Ah, see I'm the Intense Young Thinker, ever honing his aesthetic sensibilities so that he may better Know the World! Never mind that I'm not all that young anymore, or that my "intensity" is mostly due to Resting Haunted Communist Face, or that I can't say as I've thought anything since the broadband got put in, but no, it's fine! I'm shoulder to shoulder with all the other Intense Young White Guys that liberal arts programs seem to manufacture en masse, who read all the most importantest books about divorce and drinking and WWII, and who all seem to hate each other despite having everything in common! Such is I, surely!
But, see, they all went off to grad school, to teaching assistantships and adjunct positions and maybe even an editing gig at a magazine someone's cousin once heard of. I instead opted for a series of low wage customer service jobs that I could feel above and deeply inconvenienced by. Doesn't the world understand!? I just want to be left alone to my private life of contemplation and thought! Well okay, sir, maybe the shoe department at Kohl's isn't the best place to do that, you're right, but there are liminal spaces at work here that you are totally not comprehending. Like, on purpose, I think. Yes, we have that in an eleven.
So anyway, here's Honey Cured cruising up now in the existential botch he's stuck driving around, and here I am, page 247, mid-chapter, Christ, never going to finish this book with all these a-holes bothering me. Again, some monolithic self-awareness at work.
"Can you come back later, this abortion really isn't going well." I say, tapping the page with agitation. But as we all know, that little chestnut never works. The wheels of industry grind on. We have an affable transaction. He buys a season pass to park his vehicle and boat. When I inform him that the pass is now transferable between different vehicles, he claps his hands and hollers "Touchdown for Jesus!"
My mouth works for several long moments as I try and unpack that. Why is Jesus playing football? Specifically, American football? Why is that applicable? Why would he give a shit about your boat pass? Are...are you Jesus, in this metaphor? Do you refer to yourself as the messiah in third person often, or is this more of a boat-only device?
But no, no, he said it because he thought a minor, unforeseen convenience for him was, ultimately, a triumph for the creator of the universe, per his understanding. And I thought it must be nice to be that central a figure in the cosmology of life, to be that certain, and pivotal, and proud of your place in things. All things.
My finger is saving its spot in a book of escalating misery and Frenchness.I think that people are confusion ambered in meat. Flecks of ignorance, well-intentioned, ricocheting. I work in a park and I don't have a tan.
And I smile and nod eventually. He drives off to unthinkingly conquer all things coming to him, nature itself orchestrating his every found penny, and I go back to sulking in an air conditioned box, another spoiled child killing my dying, native superpower. My truck-driving soul-kin and I each playing out clumsy versions of our own asinine philosophies, contorting our lives into reassuring pantomimes. I have to figure halfway between us rests a well-adjusted individual.
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