l i f e
roll the windows down
contributions
christopher@30seconds.org
A lot of it has to do with the town I live in, the rent, and my future wife. But that's not why I'm writing this piece.
Driving that far everyday gives a person a lot of time to think. You can't read. Can't write. Can only listen so much radio. Your own music begins to haunt you after awhile and so there are those moments of pure silence.
Well, not really. There's the steady hypnotic hum of the engine and the thump, thump, thump of road reflectors. Always background noise, never pure silence, but a lot of semi-quiet time. Faux quiet in which to think.
I tried recording thoughts on a little hand-held tape recorder but I couldn't stand the sound of my own voice. I sound hollow and false to myself. I sound like an asshole. My tone is all off, either too serious or too sincere, but never what I really mean. I sound like someone at a club you'd walk away from. Right away. And sometimes on the ride home I do just that. I lose myself in the crowd.
Yeah. It's a big crowd, one long line moving at eighty miles an hour. People don't think of it that way because we're all in our own environment. Little steel and alluminum capsules with their own environmental controls. It's twenty degrees outside, no problem. Lonely, need to call someone. No problem. They even have shades now. Capsules.
So sometimes I open the windows just to remind myself that I'm really there, piloting my capsule in a crowd of people piloting their capsules.
You know our highways were built to move military equipment fast from place to place. We learned that little trick from the Germans in World War II. They had the amazing ability to move men, tanks, planes, laborers, and the living dead, from place to place with such great speed that it impressed the hell out of us Americans who at that time were still using railroads and small rural capillaries to get from place to place.
Highways are great, but they, like just about everything else larger than me, make me feel small and somehow less important in the grand scheme of things. The highway wasn't built for me, I just use it along with thousands of other people everyday. I don't live up to its purpose, its design.
Everyonce in awhile the highway takes one of us from the crowd, crumples our little capsule, and lets us know it is still in charge. It cuts across the tobacco fields, pastures, rivers, mountains, and anything else we dare put in its way. And when it reaches out and grabs us we stop. We gape. We twist and turn to get a look at the wreckage that has suddenly become human. Cellphones call out by the hundreds, airplanes circle overhead, miles up the road in either direction other people curse thier delay and tune their radios to hear the lastest on the traffic. Yeah. The traffic. And that's what scares the hell out of me during those moments of solitary confinement on the highway. That's why I roll down the windows and let the fresh air in. Because my last contribution to humanity could be this...
A traffic jam.
goodnight 12.17.97
