There is nothing lonelier than the gas-station at the edge of town in a place you have never been before. When it’s your own town, or a town you know well, there’s something comforting about it, the harbinger, the herald of the familiarity to come. The buildings, the streets, those faces you have traveled back for, they all lie within the sprawl to which the station is an informal gateway.
But when it isn’t your gas-station or your edge of town, the whole vibe is hauntingly discordant, leaves you feeling unnerved with that sense this place should seem familiar, but isn’t? You think it’s similar to home but somehow wrong in the little ways. This is because all the gas-stations at the edge of all towns are a completely locked-in business model now. Same maybe four to eight pumps, the same over-priced national brand chips and sodas. That same paltry diary section, the same bad coffee. That same slurpee dispenser with a thousand different off-brand names for any given franchise. The lotto machine and cigarettes. Same ad for whatever sort of opioid-adjacent supplements that haven’t been technically outlawed in the state. Same goddamnable boner pills.
And yet. There’s one or two uniquely-local terrible low-rent beers mixed in with the Coors swill waters. The air fresheners are the logo of a different football team than yours. The instant lottery cards are Monopoly-branded here, not Wheel of Fortune like back home. The bored teenage boy smoking outside because he can’t go home ‘til two AM, as there’s another new step-dad making time with Mom, is a redhead instead of a blonde. The fact that it’s all nearly-right is what makes it all the most wrong anything can possibly be. The gaping chasm of almosts, an uncanny valley.
You are reminded what a truly homogenized culture you live in. That business has rendered life down to the same most-profitable form factor everywhere, and you let yourself believe you had meaningful identities back home, but no. It’s the same gas-station as the one at the edge of your town with a thin new coat of paint, arbitrarily applied. Is there a Carls Jr. hamburger stand back home next to yours? Is it Hardees’ here? They are the same store, with different regional names.
This is the price we paid to have our values extracted from us in such efficient ways, because if everywhere looks like home? Nowhere looks like home. If home isn’t actually different? Home doesn’t exist at all. Just a tiny fake gesture toward the idea of home. Entenmann’s cookies here, Freihofer cookies there. You realize there is no local identity, just branding. Like an abandoned K-Mart where you can still see the outline of the K from all the dustied muck that accumulated for forty years while a K was still up there, the labelscar. No culture, just ghosts of dead names.
But you need gas, there’s nowhere else to go, can’t stop now, you’re almost home. Such as it is.
Loading comments...