October 07, 2004

Mileage Reimbursment

I don't get it." woody said.

"How do you have time to write?"

"Don't you work?"

I was talking on the cell phone, while driving - to work.

For eight weeks, from september until november, i will have driven every week day to and from Ventura and Santa Barbara. One way is 30 miles. In eight weeks, i will have driven the trip 40 times, 60 miles each day, round trip. All told, it will be 2,400 miles up- and down- that particular stretch of the pacific coast.

I am told i will be reimbursed for the mileage on my car. (California gas prices are are nearing 2 1/2 dollars a gallon.) I have tried twice, unsuccessfully to submit an expense report through the proper protocol devised by my current employer for this matter.

"It depends on what you want to do with your time." i said to him, not feeling like i was making any point.

I kept the windows up to hear him talk as i drove, and the sun shined through the guard rail posts and flickered and bled through the water spots on the windshield like a tear stained Super 8-mm movie real. California is the 4th state in four years i have lived in, i thought. and days and drivers license and interstate signs begin to stack up in my mind like a slide projector full of fading transparencies. i was driving alone on the edge of continent and I suddenly i saw my quiet voice being chopped up into packets into a perforated line up into space and triangulated across a quarter of the globe to the only person in the whole world was concerned with me right then. and then the miles between us - every one of which i have seen, came into focus. the light flickered between the guard rails i began to think about my time and what i have done with it. i began to think about always being alone. i began to think about being the only living legacy to every memory i have ever owned, across every mile that i have drove, across every circumstance i have ever been in.

woody was talking something about girlfriends and how they suck.

the hazy sun soaked through the salt on my drivers side window, and suddenly the 2,400 miles i have gone this past month began to compound and the light flickered through my head back through the mohave desert across the rocky mountains and the across the plains and over the mississippi. it flickered back past the farmlands and up through the Alleghenies. it flashed warmly and faded like a flash bulb on the fingerlakes, upstate, and on through the adirondacks and the white mountains down through the cape. it flickered through the streets of manhattan, down to wall street and under the river and out to the Bedford avenue stop in brooklyn. and then it came back again. across the Pennsylvania turnpike to the hemlocks and rocking charis in southern ohio. it streaked across the ohio valley and to the ski lifts and seeing your breath and the continental divide. as freeway bent around to the west the sun shone straight into my eyes and in the octagon glare i saw, all the way back to county roads, curfews, and volkswagen seats, like a dusty film strip flickering though the mile markers in my mind.

The only payment i can ever hope to earn from the time that i spend is every word i write and every picture i take.

i looked out the window.

woody was still talking.

every passing car was a stranger to me.

i felt like the tree that falls in the woods when no one is around. the only way i will ever be remembered is by myself and for myself. I put the visor down to shade the flickering sun and stop the light from shining on my memories.

"Well, anyways call me later this week" he said. "i gotta go."

"okay." i said, and hung up the phone. the world collapsed like shrink wrap back around my quiet voice inside my quiet car on the edge of continent.

I was all alone again.

I put down all the windows.

"I guess it really depends on how you want to remember your time." i said to no one as the sun flickered and faded into the ocean.

Posted by Todd Roeth at October 7, 2004 10:30 PM