62 Driving Details
A couple days every week, my eyes get blindingly drunk upon everything. Hunting without kill for 10 unwavering ticks of consciousness.
“Trout trudged onward, a stranger in a strange land. His pilgrimage was rewarded with new wisdom, which would never have been his had he remained in his basement in Cohoes. He learned the answer to a question many humans beings were asking themselves so frantically: ‘What’s blocking traffic on the westbound barrel of the Midland City stretch of the interstate?’”
There are two dozen or less of these cars that I am expected to drive, their differences only perceivable as subtle visual or mechanical quirks placed upon a singular entity’s character.
The derailed rolling stock do not exist as an omnibus as such, probably more accurately they’re a hemidemisemibus.
I haven’t named them all, but I call some of them ‘Jocelyn’.
They are named for the shudders and screams of their window panes on our uneven pathways.
The smaller ones exist without a name. They need less anthropomorphizing to have a neutral taste in my mind.
One has an Air conditioning unit that fills the air with staccato creaks that scrape the nape of the mind’s neck like the needles of a Geiger counter.
Adorning billboards and styrofoam insulation around town, I notice a growing and shrinking of one construction company’s brand and its legally dubious use of the Pink Panther™ as a mascot.
I see the County correctional facility advertising about their upcoming “open house.” I pray for the upcoming evacuation of due to the outbreak of irony poisoning or polemical poetical injustice.
I feel ashamed of my writing. I was tasked to write fifty observations in high school, using only the most concrete of details. Now, attempting to strip “judgement” away from “real” all I can think is: ‘it’s all cement Baybee’
The face of Tommy Le Homme is back in my mind. His name is on my driver’s manifest. My manifesto under that nom-de-plume doesn’t exist.
The visual snow has no effect on my observations.
I think I made it, like all the rest of me, up inside my mind.
The Unionized wielders road sign left to rust while it’s buildings been repurposed.
The billboards of a local bakery and the statewide law firm winking at each other other across the highway.
The sign in west Duluth that attacks DOGE for making voyager national park deadly for tourists without staff.
My favorite trio of signs: a typical “this is your sign: don’t get an abortion!” Sign trailed by a derivative “if you’re looking for a sign to order pizza, this is it” (picturing Jesus proffering a slice). This was replaced with Sasquatch, but the display space is still shared with a “looking to move your most precious belongings? Call us!” Ad featuring an infant sitting in a cardboard box. By itself the ad seems to be encouraging child trafficking in that way that only the most naive people can, but with it existing directly beneath the anti-abortion board it can only be read as an outlet to deliver delivered children somewhere else.
The venture capital (actually it’s a co-op) dairy bar by mont du lac/spirit mountain. What I might call an anti-gastronomic gastropub.
The “milk house” that to my untrained eye functions as a completely ordinary gas station in piedmont.
Distinct from the hobbyist joggers that bristle with running equipment, a man bustles past shuttles with a milk crate in one hand. He holds it down at his side, refraining from swinging it.
Traditional bus drivers seek validation for their biases and methods of communication against specific passengers by providing other drivers with them. I do not engage in this time with my peers, and attempting understanding with my riders always ends up as uncomfortably personal, or stiff silence.
My mind, a porous thing, is still invaded with their prejudices when they are the only information I am given. I’ve gotten worse at talking to other people.
I hear a fly buzz —while I drive.
Kurt Vonnegut’s book “breakfast of champions” is a casting away of the mass assortment of garbage that other people had put into his head by the age of fifty (including slurs, prejudice, racism).
I worry sometimes that my reading of it, my listening to it, and my work with people three to five decades older than me will inculcate the shape of their garbage and trauma upon me.
Because of these influences, the n-word has audio in my thoughts. It didn’t used to. I used to pour over every hip hop release I could get my hands on for a decade and could always maintain a mental hold on ever hearing a voice in my head say a word that I wanted to hold in the past. My mind is weaker now, as it was when I was a child. Alone. Either drifting or spiraling, every wish to cease can only provoke a reinforcement of that which I feared or hurt from.
My ears ring.
I think on purpose, “Driving as an occupation entails thousands more instances awash in the conscious mind than you could ever hope to understand or compartmentalize. After seeing so much of the bizarre and a higher order of the mundane without a seconds lapse, anything will seem to lose its substance. Everything is artifice, and against the Dao.”
Half a dozen motorcyclists, all with very specific proclivities: using their arms to soar, to dance, and wiggle rather than steer. Promenading their custom big bird tri-wheel, a fursona helmet, or their boyfriend up and down the most busy streets.
I barely register 1% of all of the animals that have crossed my path as long as they maintain my driving record of not colliding with anything larger than a no-see-um. The words: “skunk, raccoon, turkey vulture that swooped right in front of me, unidentified raptors, deer” are in my green journal, underneath: “TURKEY! GOOSELINGS!”
I try to interrupt the concentric circles and yet I am contained within still. Erratic arm sweeps or delving into the songs held deep in my chest do not shake the paralytic in their soft tissue. The rhythmic dirge of driving instructions with song, and the slurry my favorite songs are poisoned.
Kendrick said “sometimes I’m afraid of my open mind.”
“[she] was pure machinery at the moment, a machine made of meat—a typing machine, a filing machine. [he], on the other hand, had nothing machine-like to do. He ached to be a useful machine.”
Brief ideas creep through but are lost in the noise without time to stop and transcribe them. Some get their time but have little potency.
“He established a sort of relationship to the traffic on the interstate, too, appreciating its moods.”
I dream up an image, “a guy proudly using his auto-express unlimited use (30 day limit) subscription to wash all of his vehicles, including donning full leather and a helmet to run his RTV and motorcycle through the futuristic sphincter of the car wash.”
With my eyes I see a trailer hauling a vertical slice of a climbing wall.
Sunday Service was cancelled, they’re doing Aerobics in the chapel.
I see a bike strapped atop an automobile stuck on the daily commute hoard of the highway, and picture someone maximizing good deeds by riding upon it, carpooling but still getting their morning ride.
In America, cars and people both have to shoulder the burdens of the myth of individualism, which explains why Kilgore Trout wrote a story about a planet of cars having an apocalypse like ours. I spin a low stakes conspiracy theory: Pleas to bring back a humane edge to everyday life range have evolved from the stationary (“Drive like YOUR kids live here”) posts in yards to more visible targets. The avenue is filled with stickers of well wishing on every bumper (“I hope you have a nice day”). The sneakier tactic is the proliferation of STUDENT DRIVER cars, asking for statistically undeserved but sorely needed patience from your fellows-in-cars. When I was in Driver’s Ed they warned me that student driver stickers encouraged aggressive maneuvers from all around who didn’t want to get stuck behind slow traffic, but now many people who aren’t good at driving have found a response to the many screaming “what the f*** is wrong with this person?!” that I suspect tries to shame that impulse of frustration.
Passengers share their stories and I try to think like an artist.
They’re sick of looking at “the people downtown” on drugs or homeless or asking for money or sleeping or whatever else.
And disgusted by people having sex in public spaces.
Two days pass and I am walking an alley and am startled by a man racing down the street, not slowing his truck to blare his car horn and flash his brights at two people talking and kissing while leaning against a wall. I almost laugh aloud at this display by someone who thinks themselves so correct in abrasive behavior.
My ears register out-loud-wondering if Duluth’s indirect communication style is the result of inter-generational drug abuse.
So casually causal when hanging around correlations.I shake my head. I hear other thinking too.
Venting in the aftermath of a blind date gone wrong. Flirting with each other or making friendships from the simple incident of scheduling a ride to or from the same place at a similar time. I’ve only seen this happen for theater performances, reinforcing my belief in art needing to warm away the social ice around here.
I treasure the few times I hear laughter.
I think about the Passengers complaining (or worse) just commenting matter-of-factly on how limited and poor the ‘separate but equal’ transit service for them is. Inquiring about each other’s setup for wheelchair replacements and housing, hearing about a good one but then finding it won’t work with their accessibility or income needs.
I find my mind thinking, “And then some number of them proudly support Donald Trump’s Administration. Finding an upsetting dissonance to live in more uncomfortable than their peers who simply rely on Medicaid and have a retirement.”
I try not to think of our dead.
The heat in my chest does not rise to my decalcified teeth and fades into nausea without action. The body clings to it’s brackish thirst.
I think, “serving them to empower their everyday needs has not made my life more harmonious, nor my ability to engage with them develop.”
I think on purpose, “I have a vague sense to keep doing my job despite this, until the few privileged enough to have this basic access to transportation have it defunded. We all keep each other ‘along for the ride,’ in a manner that is starved but sustaining. I find myself in a mirrored inversion to those I serve, which may contribute to my hardship in connecting. In addition, of course, to it being a fireable offense to build relationships of any kind with the people I serve.”
“This much I knew and know: I was making myself hideously uncomfortable by not narrowing my attention to details of life which were immediately important, and by refusing to believe what my neighbors believed.”
Hundreds of cars clog every available artery to fill the sandbar coast. Every enginepipe pouring a stream of exhaust into the ocean of smoke around all ways. A new kind of smokestack, I’m not quite enthused enough to make the pun better.
“But his mind wouldn’t leave it alone at that.” p37
I cannot escape the cabin with my thoughts, but outside is no reprieve. It’s poison out there, and all I see is people acting like it isn’t.
I have to remind myself how this capsule changes my acquaintanceship with the only coworker I meet: the passage of time. We have little regard for each other, but what behavior I exhibit in their presence may garner severity. Lapses in driving are up to me to spend, and could be any length. Eating without hunger fills my longer breaks. “the grains and meat taste like grains and meat.” Without excess saliva each bite requires twice as many undulations of teeth, and the period between intercepts may stretch to equal the pulses in my head. Pooling hundreds and hundreds demand what goes for focus in this den. Blank stares are issued in response to any time I think should be used but can not hold a purpose in the focal length of my eyes. Leaving my pod of plastic and steel for a walk about is shocking, it takes up a quarter of the time I think it does.
Inside and outside of my vehicle, no one wants to identify themselves as “at-risk”. Every child and elder, every asthmatic and every other sensitive person seems content to exist only in the extremes. Those that are concerned have emptied from the public spheres, those who are apathetic people them. Someone puts a lit cigarette into the outdoor receptacle and its small circular opening continues breathing as they were: smoke in, smoke out. equivalent exchange. If I was a humorist I could make that funny too. I can understand some when they express that they bore our winter burden and so they will not be deterred from enjoying every summer day and clear sidewalk we have. I can’t understand when it translates to seeing young children chasing each other in the clouds, adults training for a marathon, families going to see the sailboats in the harbor and the block parties in the city. Taking no precaution, making no exception to try to do normal human activities in a world where space and time for that is forever disappearing. Ignoring the Air quality warnings to breathe warm air, ignoring the riptide warnings to swim in the lake, ignoring the wildfire warnings to have a bonfire, adding one more giant plume of smoke to gather with the rest.
Kurt Vonnegut’s brother was a chemist, so he also trained as a chemist. My brother trained as a chemist, and currently gets paid to inhale agents that cause cancer and destroy any biological material that meets it while in the business of constructing planes. McDonald’s pays $17 an hour in the poor end of town, $18 in lakeside. He earns 1 dollar more to make private jets for billionaires all over the world. Kurt worried aloud about how creators can poison the world with bad ideas, and in so doing I am more obliged to be cynical but hold my joy and wonder intact. His brother discovered silver iodide can sometimes make it snow or rain, and this encouraged my mother to think of the tendencies of men as unequal measures of toxic positivity and negativity.
I visit a rest stop and a pair of black Adidas slides come in to use the urinal. The sound a spray going in many directions is deafened by gas expelling loudly enough to create an echo with brass timbre. A pause, then proclamation: “you can’t have lightning without the thunder,” then the slides cut a straight path to the exit. I find it odd that he felt the need to clear the air in that singular way, a comment for the benefit of the legs in the stall. I wonder if he would have approached the sink if the legs called back: “pissy sandals.”
A kid came up and asked if he did a trick if I would give him a dollar. I paused to buck off the canned response to melt strangers away, but it did nothing for the physical reality I don’t carry cash on me. To bolster my cowardice and anxiety about failing an interaction so poorly I’d be attacked. I awkwardly told him I’d love to but I didn’t have a dollar and he said “really?” Not super disbelieving, or at least I told myself that any I found in his voice was my own invention. Potentially sensing that he needed to make his case, perhaps to prove he wasn’t just a panhandler that folks like me train to ignore, he explained that he was working to save up 15 dollars by biking up and down the street, because the gas station across the street had ripsticks. Upon checking my wallet I surprised upon 45 dollars, and thought about this while I misunderstood his casual question “what kind of bus this was” to be about the vehicle and not the service provided. I replied with the eyebrow raising line “yeah I don’t really know myself, one of the smaller ones.” After realizing my mistake but having drifted too far to correct it I opted to go back to our original conversation. Coming with an energy of fuck it but with a hopefulness tied in, I said “y’know what? if it’s a really cool trick, I’ll give you the five I have.” He wheeled up the street to get some room while I climbed out of the pit. He popped a wheelie and pedaled past, then turned around, perhaps feeling that five dollars deserved a bigger, cooler showing, and went back. His change in ambition eclipsed the balance of forces and he hopped down before the bike flipped turfside up. Smiling sheepishly he walked the bike towards me, and after a moments deliberating, I handed him the bill. I climbed into the cabin and as I recracked my lunch bag saw the boy madly pedaling to the gas station, and not even a minute after disappearing through the doors racing back passed me to bring the treasure home.
Theresa tells me: “thank you for being yourself” i laugh awkwardly and say “You’re welcome i guess, I mean, it’s literally the least i can do!” The response catches me: “but it’s also the most.” It’s a silly little paradox, this living thing.
