Maple trees always seem to to get their leaves early in the spring. and thank god for that. had there been no shade on me as i walked past the sorority houses on college street i think the light would have killed me. I was squinting as it was. my eyes hurt. my head throbbed. and everybody but me was walking upright.
I, on the other hand, was walking in a manner so that my head wouldn't bounce so that my dried up brain could rest in the last little puddle of moisture at the tip of my spine and not touch the inside of my pickled skull. that is hard to do when you are running to a meeting you are late to.
As i lurched across college green i tried my best to replay the events. i started with the obvoius and worked my way back: ......
i had 3 dollars in my clammy hands. okay that's a start...
i took them from her purse
the purse was on her hardwood floor
where i was crawling across from the kitchen
where there is water
and there was huge bins of cereal
and tubs of hot dogs
and containers of sliced tomatos
it was dark
and we were running
with the giant bins full of cereal
and styrofoam bowls too
along with several others, includeing leanne and perez
perez was disguised in 3-d movie glasses
we were runnng down a hallway
everything was pink
i was belly crawling across the tile floor of the foyer into the Phi Beta Phi house
we were on leanne's roof where perez was singing
no i was singing he was playing the guitar
but i was cold because went into a house and put my shirt in a washing machine
after i moonwalked out of the bar
my shirt was covered in someone else's blood
i thought that was cool
i was at the bar licking whiskey of off perez's hand
i spilled whiskey all over perez's arm and some other people
i was doing shots of jamison
i was drinking george dickel on the rocks
i told perez if we actually finished the whole bottle of dickle i would moonwalk right of the bar
two dickles on the rocks were put in front of me
i pointed at leanne behind the bar and put up two fingers
i walked into the bar with perez
i put on a clean white shirt
i hung up the phone
she said "i am bartending tonight. if you come to pawpurr's you will drink for free all night for making my website ."
i picked up the phone
the phone rang.
that was it . sort of . no matter. the corners of my lips were caked with granola flakes and stained with whiskey. i went into the oaisis and spent the aforementioned three dollars on a bottle of purple gatorade, then ran into Scott Quad, i opend the door to the conference room; 15 minutes after everyone else got there. god did my head hurt. god did i stink. i was sweating. the ink from the stamps on my hand were bleeding off and leaving indigo streakes on the beige conference table. Scott quad is where a lot of audio recording is done. so the conference room i and the 10 other students and faculty were sitting in was windowless and covered sound aborbing black foam. it was so quiet in there i couldhear my heartbeat in my forehead. i just kept drinking purple gatorade.
"does anyone see the dry board eraser?" my instrutor askes us." well i will just use a paper towel." he commenced to remove the 4'x8' white board of its charts, notes arrows and numbers. i take a drink of purple gatorade.
i am not saying it was his fault. of course not. but he really was pressing hard agaisnt the board. and the noise was really loud. and my head really hurt. the sweat immediatly crept up my back. and the purple gatorade crept up my throat. i couldn't move. my eyes began to water. all i could do was act like was drinking my purple gatorade.
at first i bet no one noticed. my mouth was sealed around the lip of the bottle. but the vomit came out real hard. and the clear plastic bottle still had some purple gatorade in it. the vomit was splashing and churing in the bottle. it reminded me of when i look through the window as my jeep goes through the splish splash auto bath back in troy. it was getting fuller. finally, i felt the hot foam hit my lips and i had to let go. i pulled my mouth off the purple gatorade bottle. the room was silent up to this point. as i pulled away a gyser of foamy purple gatorade, granola, cornflakes, wheates, and a whole lot of whisky came blasting out of the bottle. and it sounded like one of those nature tapes of humpback whales that you buy at those stores that sell expensive wooden and brass telescopes.
as i walked back across college green i did feel better. my head was clearer. and i got to leave the meeting early.
standard question for monday: "how was your easter weekend?" did you have a nice dinner with your family?"
standard answer: " "it was fine. i went to my grandmother's house on sunday"
my answer:
The brakes still worked. and axl didn't spin out from under her, but it didn't look good. clementine was leaking all kinds of oil from her left rear wheel. Dad and Jerry and I were clearing a trail up to the top of ridge when we noticed it. The sun was getting low and we had to get back for our easter dinner. I drove her real gingerly back to the cabin. we ate out on the deck, and the cloves from the ham mixed real nice with the scent of hot axl oil.
After desert we jacked her up and took off the wheel. Of course we had no idea what were doing. but a hub assembly from a 1979 CJ-5 isn't rocket science right?. but we wouldn't know, because we couldn't get it off the jeep. Dave showed up about dusk.
"blew the seal. maybe the bearings." he says.
"okay." i say.
"let's get into her" he says.
"okay." i say.
From that point in time saturday evening, until the early hours of easter morning i quite possibly learned more than i have or will hope to have learned in the 5 figured price tag of my college education.
"we need a puller" he says.
"okay." i say.
Dave returns about dark with a medevil claw contraption and we fasten it to clementines left rear hub. Dave cranks on the big bolt with a 2 foot wrench. the cold forged claws silently bite in the back of the rusty hub. clementine shutters on the jack. the hub never moves.
"we need a slam hammer." dave says.
"okay." i say.
"only guy i know who has one of those is lenord flemming." dave and i hop in the truck and head over to lenord's house. before i tell you what meeting lenord involves i should mention that the ride over through the dark hills of hocking county dave told me about when he butchered his cattle this winter. "when i shot the second one in the head with the .22, it just dropped like that. so it took a real long time to bleed it out. what you want is to have it keep warm for a while so the blood starts pour out before it gets cold. but the second just dropped and never moved."
"okay." i say.
we continued to talk about his new 22O meat saw and his grinder as we pulled across the rickety bridge to lenord's house. As we get out of the car and start walking to his garage (which is approx. 3 times larger than his house) I ask dave: "is this sort of wierd that we are coming over on a saturday night to get this guy's tools?"
"hell, i've known lenoard all my life. He is a good man. lost his leg when he was 5, but the man sure knows how to build cars. "He used to work in detroit?" "No, he just builds cars, look at his truck. built it from the ground up. 77, 78 dodge. got a 440 in it. you would never know that the pickup truck bed is a hydrolic dump. and under the tool box he has a 10 gallon air compessor and 4 valves coming out under the step bar to run pnematic tools. and you know my dump truck? it's got a 4,ooo lb winch on the front. lenord's got a 45,000 lb. winch on the front of his. - and one on the back. you should see that truck over at the campground. it just pulls trailers around like they were made of paper."
Walking up his lane was like walking through a Mad-Max movie set. "lenord lost one of his eyes. But he still works on engines all the time..." "Yeah, he won't mind at all. he is a good man. hell i remember once when i was growing up i stoped over and lenord had his finger caught in his lawnmower. he had been trying for half and hour to cut it off. He told me to get out my pocket knife and cut him loose. I remember he just took the end of his finger and threw it in the woods. I took him to the ER. He said he would rather have a short finger than have it sewed back on and hurt him the rest of his life."
about now we make it to the side door of lenords house. It was real dark out as dave open the door and leaned in "Hey lenord; we need to borrow a slam hammer." i waited on the stoop thinking: here i am. A complete stranger at 10:30 on saturday night before easter at the house of a man who has a wooden leg, a glass eye, and a missing finger. and i have come to ask for a slam hammer."
Out walks lenord, who, much to my surprise looks remarkedly like an older version of woody's dad.
He opens the garage. I follow him into his garage. I am certain there are things in that garage that could revolutionize the internal combustion engine industry. I couldn't focus on anything. Timing belts hung from the rafters over engine blocks and 10 gallon buckets of carburator valves. every wall was covered in peg board and filled with tools hanging off other tools. AutoZone's got nothing on this guy. "This should work. and here are 2 lug pattern plates. one of them should work. i bought this in 195.....5 so i can't remember what it fits." lenord says in his quiet slow speech.
"okay." i say. and walk out with a tool resembling a cast iron breast pump.
"I'll be up untill 11:00, then i am going to take a bath, but i will leave the door open" leanord says...
the slam hammer didn't work. we go back to lenords. now it's even darker. dave walks up ahead of me through the mad max movie set. by the time i get to the house, lenord, without his shirt on, is walking out to the garage with dave.
There i am. 11:30 on a saturday night before easter. I am returning a slam hammer to a man with a wooden leg, a glass eye, and a missing finger who is now in his garage half dressed after his bath, lighting a aceletenine torch and is now burning out a CJ-5 lug pattern into a 1/2 plate of metal and welding it to a pipe with capped end and a 1" coarse threaded bolt in the end ot it.
"i made on of these for a dodge once," he says as the bright white sparks run across the greasy floor land into the pile of greasy rags. Dave then tells the story about the last time lenord was using the torch and caught his fake leg on fire. The flames were up over lenord's head before he knew it was on fire. lenaord just smiled quitley from under his welding mask.
"depending on whether is is a floating axl or not," lenord says as he pulls out a jeep manual and opens it on the v-6 toyota engine block, " your gonna need to reset the bearings."
"okay." i say.
After some research in the manual, he sends dave and I out with a custom made hub puller, and empty 10W-30 motor oil box full of tools.
by 1:30am on easter, dave and had the dark lane at the cabin strewn with brake drums, axl shims, and the elusive left rear axl and its blown seals and bearings.
"don't worry about putting this back together, todd" dave says as we are in the kitchen washing off our black hands. "lenord got a DUI and can't drive, but i will take him into town and he will know what parts to get. and he can probabally put clementine back together with his eye closed.
"lenord is a good man."
clancy was sitting on my bed. his white socks had long lost their elasitcity, and had slid down off the end of his feet until they looked like albino beagle ears hanging out of his blue jeans. He threw the columbus dispatch on the floor. "Yesterday it was the Cleveland Plain Dealer, i guess today it is the Distpatch."
"what is it."
"You mean you haven't heard?"
I leaned over in my chair and picked up the paper. "I have been living in a hole i guess." I opened the paper and leaved through the different sections.
"Larry has formal charges agaisnt him for sexual harrasment. It it blew up wednesday, and every paper in the state is calling the department trying to get the scoop."
It was about then that i found the article on page C5 of the metro/state section.
There are always containers in life. boundaries. zones. There are comfort zones. There are boundaries of familiarity, in physical space, intellectual space, i suppose emotional space too. They are designated by boundaries. When you cross those boundaries, perspectives change. Maybe that is why cows seem content to graze in the same pasture their whole life. That pasture is their universe, container. It is familiar. It is comfortable. It is their frame of reference. But should the gate ever be left open, and they walk out of it. Then they might realize how contained and limited thier life has been to that point. suddenlty that pasture gets a whole lot smaller.
Reading in the state newspaper quotes from the director of my college argueing over the symantics of whether the student verbally objected before he took her bra off or not, was sort of like me wandering through and open gate. My reference got reframed.
As i finished the article i was dumbfounded. I knew of the stories. His book of naked student photos. His attitude towards girls in the program. But now it seemed real. Clancy continued with a bunch of info about the ordeal. He talked about how all faculty reacted. Now I was listeninng to Clancy sitting on my bed in his sagging tube socks telling me about how all my teachers were answering reporter's questions about nudity and bra straps i felt the frame around my reference keep getting bigger. And my boundaries of familiarity getting smaller. "So much for the whole role model thing." is said lightly. "Well'" said Clancy, I think the attituide i have, and i think a lot of the faculty have is that Larry has his obvoius merits. Everyone has their faults, it is human to screw up. As good as somone is at one thing, they likeley lack at somewhere else."
My reference kept zooming out. I was walking farther from the pasture. It wasn't that my perspective of Larry had changed. I still respected him as much as before clancy kicked off his new balances and jumped on my bed with the newspaper. Maybe in some unusual way, i respect him more. He used to be the person who decided what pictures we saw in the national geographic, was was the epitimay of good visual judgement, let me into grad school, and gave me a scholarship. Now he is guy who decided what pictures we saw in the national geographic, is the epitimay of good visual judgement, let me into grad school, and gave me a scholarship, and likes to see girls naked.
I don't know who did what or why. I am not concerend about the details of this particular event. But what it does make me think about is my unstationary perspective that defines my reality.
I began to think about all the pastures i have lived in in my life. All the boundaries i have placed in my life and around other people in my life. I thought about when the sherrif arrested me for breaking curfew in high school. I though about when me and the intern got so drunk we didn't show up for work until noon during my first month at my new job out of college. I thought about all the rules i have broke. All the containers i have fell out of. Was my parents attitude the same as my professors? Did the sherrif go home that morning and laugh with his wife about the poor kid who got caught? Did my boss close her office door and say "boys will be boys."?
I have crossed a lot of boundaries. Most have been going from right into wrong. But i am okay. I am still grazing. I am just grazing in a bigger pasture.
I am beggining to examine the containers in my life. I am questioning the boundaries i have placed between comfortable and uncomfortable. I am examining the mental zones i have put around the 'important' people in my life. I am begginining to realize that the biggest boundaries in my life are due to my own perception . Most of the fences in my life are built by my own doing. And I can open the gates most any time i choose.
One time growing up (as if it is over), i remember a cow walking through our front yard. It was just wandering abound under the pear trees eating grass. Even the farmer was laughing when he came to take it back. I can still remember him saying " If i was a cow, i suppose i would want to wander too."
Every once in a great while things just line up. If i try to think about the infinite subtilelies and variables that somehow added and subtracted to any particular expeirence, let alone the one i had today, i would surely drive myself mad.
It spawned from a reoccuring topic of discussion i have been having with sam. Earlier today i remember hearing myself tell sam that i used to have dreams about being great. Not great in any epic sense, but i just wanted to be great at something. be a master of some facet of being. I told him it is very ironic that i am supposed to be getting a 'masters' degree, but yet i feel like i am heading in any direction but.
"I used to want to be great. but there are too many other things to be."...
Pear blossom petals fell like spring's confetti on Congress ave. as second gear leaned us back in the faded leather seats. The world was divided into bronze and violet. As clementine neared third gear, the rythm between the bronze evening light and voilet shadows punched into it by the awkward off-white houses quickened.
"Wasn't that jody?" perez asked over the crackle of hank williams that trickled out of the rainbow of speaker wires and electrical tape that snaked past the stick shift.
It was. But i let that go. For a while this evening i let a lot go.
"I used to want to be great. but there are too many other things to be."
There are things that i will do. There are even more things that i think i will need to do. But as we accelerated out rt. 50, i was for at least a while, i was comfortable with being where i was in life. Dylan crackled through the wires and competed with the crickets on co. rd. 24. Oak tree buds hung low over the road and the evening light illuminated them like chandeliers. As we rounded the corner past an old ivory farmhouse the sun burned through the cracks in the dirty windshield. I closed my eyes for a moment as clementine bounced over the crumbling shoulder of the road. I saw the sun shine through my eyelids. I smelled the lillac. I listened to perez's story. I felt springtime as we drove right through it's belly.
The other day i told sam that i feel like my life is a sentence. It will end with a period. If i am lucky perhaps an exlamation mark. But either way it will end. The adjectives and adverbs are what make it interesting. I used to want to be great. maybe i want to be a great designer. or a great photographer. but driving through the spring evening i did the rough math on the infinite subtlties and variables that somehow added and subtracted to me sitting there in a muddy 1979 CJ-5 with the top off and an honest friend beside me. We will both go places and do things, and we will laugh and we will cry. but for right then and there there was no future or past. and i was comfortable with those variables.
As i opened my eyes, i saw myslef in third person. I saw the situation. I understood the circumstances. And for a few hours of my life, i was completly happy with what was at hand. i didn't think about the work i wasn't doing. I didn't think about where else i could be. I didn't think about what will happen next. I was happy with the present tense.
Later we picked up genovese on the sidewalk and went to dairy queen.We ate chili dogs and ice cream on the weathered picnic table that sat in the shaggy grass speckled with ketchup packets and cigarette butts. I ran into a girl while getting a cherry dipped cone that i know from somewhere in my history, and invited to genovese's show next week. We stopped by my place and perez and i listened to genovese play some of his new songs on the gutiar in the back room by the kitchen. Savita called me to say hi. I talked to her in the dirty linoloium kitchen while genovese sang a song. My sister was somewhere in athens runnng with prada. I sat back down and listened to the songs. I had mud all over my flip-flops, coney sauce on my shirt, and dripped ice cream on the crotch of my pants. We talked about easy things. The evening was turning blue. Genovese had to do some laundry. Perez had to get ready to bartend.
I used to want to be great. But there are other adjectives in life.
I thought for sure it would harder than what it was. As clementine coasted down the slope and creeped to a stop, dave's horses trotted along side her in curiosity. I was still standing on the hillside closing the pasture gate. From that vantage point clementine looked like a faded ladybug plopped in the middle of a bright green pasture. Dickey and Trostle jumped out of her and immedialty opened her hood. In the green pasture, space allowed Stephey and Woody parked their trucks around her as if clementine was telling dirty jeep jokes to the other cars.
"It's been a pretty hard winter," as i walked into the pow wow of jeeps, guys, and horses..."I hope she starts up okay."
No problem." Trostle replied as he loosened the wingnut on the air filter. "Dickey, get in and turn her over." Dickey jumped in and turned the key, Trostle shoved his dirty index finger down the choke and pulled open the butterfly valve.
Clementine yawned, shuttered and came to life. Woody's dog celebrated by eating a pile of horse shit. We in attendence debated then whether to jack her up right there and put the 4 new wheels on her that were sitting back of stephey's pickup, or drive her back up the the cabin first. "This ground looks pretty soft." Dickey said. "we might as well take her back up before we go exploring ."
The ground was soft. And a good thing for Trostle.
We were standing around Clementine talking about how easy she started up after such a cold winter. Trostle was standing beside the 4 new wheels in the back of stepheys pickup, admiring dave's horses. Without a word, He silently climbed onto the back of the biggest horse.
I don't think anyone else at that point even noticed. even i, for some reason didnt think to begin to laugh. yet. For a brief second, the horse didn't seem to mind. But when it felt trostle's feet against it's ribs. it took off. The sudden motion of three horses breaking into a full gallop caught everyone's eyes. We all looked up from clementine and just stared. There, blazing across green pasture were three painted horses. The middle one was bucking wildly. On top of that one was Trostle.
I can see it like a freeze frame on monday night football. It sort of looked like a wyoming liscense plate. Only it was trostle, not a silhouete of an anyomous cowboy. And Trostle wasn't on the steed anymore but rather about 5 feet above and slighty to the right of it. At the apex of his flight he was uncomfortably canted to his left, almost horizontal to the pasture some 10 feet below him. He really didn't move much, he was just sort of flying awkwardly through space. When he left the bare back of the horse would say it was at about full speed, so from the point of ejection to his landing probally covered 20 - 25 linear feet.
By now we were all laughing real hard. So as Trostle's body slammed in the green pasture, the laughter only got louder. he looked like a crash test dummy when he hit. his limbs were all loose and flailing. Actually by then, at least I was crying, i was laughing so hard.
And that was only noon on saturday. None of us stopped having a good time. Even Trostle. Of course seeing Trostle falling off the dam and down the rocky waterfall later that day was a big bummer.*
12 hours later i was sitting by a campfire with charlie horses in my sides from laughing so hard. It was the first time in a while I have had a day like that. It looking back it seemed like several days. I hope those conversations, and situations last longer in my memory than the ruts woody's jeep made in the woods.
didn't say a word. I just turned around and walked out of the bar.
For all i know he was still kissing her. not 3 minutes earlier we rolled in. it was the usual disregard for fire codes and underage laws. what do you want to drink?" i asked perez. "hold on," he said. " come meet this girl waving at me. my sister used to baby sit her...."
I followed the black cowboy hat through the perfume and cigarette smoke. by the time i caught up to him in the crowd she was kissing him. that was wierd. but what is wierder, is that as soon as she planted her lips on his, he calmly looks over at me, looks me in the eye and winks.
so i was standing out side. it was beginning to rain. stephy was m.i.a.. so was annie. i headed back to Tony's. a few hours ealier i left stephey there after a brief introduction to my friends and friends of friends. I left with perez to pick up the aforementioned black cowyboy hat from my house. By the time we had returned, my friends and friends of friends were high fiving and hugging stephey. he had stripped to his 1996 hunter green Ohio High School Basketball Tshirt with holes around the neck. there were a half dozen empty shot glasses on the table and a few single dollar bills. "We are playing darts for shots of whiskey" he proclaimed upon my return.
but this time he wasn't there. but my friends and friends of friends still were. I took off my rose embroidered shirt i recently purchased in Reno, and hung it on a bar stool and drank another bottle of Stroh's.
This is where things get foggy.
I will just state the facts to the best of my ability.
I look over. Jody is wearing my rose embroidered shirt. {probabally because i was either slobbering on it, or i kept asking her to wear it until it was less uncomfortable for to put it on then ignore me any longer}
I look down. I am dancing to a blugrass band in the Casa Cantina with Tippi. {Tippi, while she surley enjoys music and maybe even dancing to it, has a probability of 1 in 100 enjoying dancing to bluegrass music. and about a 1 in 1000 of enjoying dancing to it with me.}
I look up. The sky is crying harder than my liver. I am standing on Congress street in a puddle and i am staring at my rose embrodered shirt in the dark rain. {the rose embroidered shirt, still worn by jody, who was also standing in a puddle on Congress in the dark rain, was likley there trying to tell me which way to my house, or was talking to me because i it was less uncomforatble to do so than watch me sleep in the bushes}
I opened my mouth. {never a good idea. ever.}
I vaguly hear myself spouting my heart and mind to a very wet roseembroidered shirt. And i also remember trying to answer questions like, "what do you want in this life?" and "who is Todd Roeth?" {of course my blood was full of whiskey and ears were full of rain. So she may have have been asking me " why don't you just leave me alone?" - and please take this ugly rose embroidered shirt back."}
No matter. moving on.
"Yeah, whatever you say..." the rose embrodered shirt says " but i think those people are having sex up there." I turn around. the lights were on. The blinds were up. The window was open. and they were both naked. I walked up on her porch and peered next door for a closer look. They were having sex. We watched. {i watched. jody stood in the cold rain.}
walking home that night was one of the sublimly finer points in my recent history. I havn't felt that truley cold and alone in a long time.
I couldn't find my friends.
{and they weren't looking for me.}
My socks were wet.
{and they didn't match.}
And i was too drunk to talk to a girl in the rain.
{and she was too sober to talk back.}
level orange, high condition to be exact. and since then i have logged roughly over 7,000 miles via this government - i mean this nation's - airline industry. i asked woody as we took off from reno how many miles he figured i will have flown in our trip to lake tahoe and my trip to austin last week. "well," he said as he put his seat into the upright position and pausing for about 2 seconds, "about 7,000 miles."
i just typed in the driving directions to and from columbus-austin and to and from columbus-lake tahoe.
sure enough: the total is 7058.82 m.
i still smelled like gin. i could still taste the 99 cent egg breakfast i ate. i still had dirty grey hands from all the coins my sweaty hands fed into the slots. what time was? didn't matter. i had 3 times zones to pick from and my watch didn't match any of them. we were flying to Phoenix, on the 6:00 am flight. 22 hours earlier i was standing in parking lot in california drinking bottles of guiness that jim was opening in the door lock in the frame of a jeep grand cherokee.
since then i had been reduced to gathering up pocket change and combining it with woody's pocket change in order to play nickel slot machines. if you have ever sat blurry eyed in a smoky casino restuaraunt at 3:00 am. eating fried eggs and playing keno with your mother then you know the expiereince i had. i think about the time woody and i were running across the reno/tahoe airport grounds at 4:00am because the rental car shuttle guy went home, that it officially became a good trip.
i was sleeping on a table while the intercom looped through a synthetically sedate woman reminding me that all airports were on "level orange high alert. there is no parking allowed curbside, and only ticketed passengers are allowed past the securtiy stations."
in my mildly hallucigenic state my dreams took me to strange places.
"level orange high alert. there is no parking allowed curbside, and only ticketed passengers are allowed past the securtiy stations."
about 4:30 the xray machines turned on.
"level orange high alert. there is no parking allowed curbside, and only ticketed passengers are allowed past the securtiy stations."
a few minutes later i could hear the emplyees snap on their latex gloves to start checking baggage.
"level orange high alert. there is no parking allowed curbside, and only ticketed passengers are allowed past the securtiy stations."
i stood up. took off my belt. and my shoes. had no change in my pockets. put my camera in a tub and walked through the detector.
later, in my rancid slumber over kansas i could hear woody lamenting to my sister about how much it sucks that while sitting in a exit ailse as were, you had more legroom, but you couldn't recline the seats.
i began to think about what a dynasty our american culture has. i began to wonder if anything will ever change my life style. i mean more than just taking off my shoes to walk through a metal dector. as much as cnn/msnbc/abc/nbc/fox wants to sell me drama and life altering news, will we ever change our ways? what have i changed about my way of life during this level orange alert? more importantly have i ever changed anything about my life not by my own choice? i have just flown across the majority of the continent twice, and both for leisure, mind you, and never once worried about stepping on a land mine. never once had to forgo running water. never once went hungry. nor did any of the (obese) people i watched betting $100 at the roullete tables.
"god dammit." a voice said behind me. "everyone is so allergic to everything these days. i can't even get peanuts on airplane anymore. i have to eat pretzels"
It seemed like i was living through a memory that had happened long ago. or maybe it will be one of those vauge recollections that will stay with me for years to come. my world was a vignette of darkness around my dashboard lights with March whispering through my window. i was driving through what has to be the blackest of nights in the darkest part of the state of ohio. There were no other headlights. no other houses with blue tv flicker in the windows. no gas station neon signs. no stars in the sky. for a while i wondered if i was still alive. not because being alone or being in the dark scares me. it were only that it would have felt quite serene.
but somewhere north of marietta and south southwest of cambridge, just past the reach of the last north american glacier, the frequencies get really spooky.
bouncing around the boundaries of appliachia, the AM band was a delerious mess of overlapping channels, drifting in and out of their analogue consciousness. fire and brimstone was being preached from the pulpit between hautning reports from the war in the middle east, which blended into hawiian gutiar and sports talk radio.
it was the sum of all these parts, plus some unspoken feelings that gave way to a mild epiphany under the black sky of eastern ohio. my train of thought seemed to tumble through the darkness with the radio. i suddenly realized there are more contradictions in life than there are absolute truths. and that there are far too many ways of life to every be convinced that there is even such a thing as right and wrong. the preacher was damning homosexuality and witchcraft, as sgt. peppers lonely hearts club band echoed in the background. sports announcers butted in with e.r.a. stats over the numbers of dead soldiers in iraq. educated men were debating sexual impotence and alaskan oil drilling while a static strewn voice advertised a free 64 o.z. drink with a 10 gallon fill up.
is there anything left to wonder about? has everything been analized, debated, and quantified? how can anyone with the least bit of awareness and perspective ever be comfortable with what they understand?
and began to think about the realativity of what it means to believe in something. i thought about the supposed absolutes in life; like love, and government, and god, and all the ideas that people live by, and argue their short lives away with.
as i approched columbus, NPR tuned in and silenced more than just the static in my truck speakers. it was sort of like waking up from a sublime dream. the interstate lights and brake lights brought me back to a mediocre state of mentality.
my gas light came on, so i swtiched to FM.
and i began to look for the free 64 oz. drink special.