the traffic
It’s 8:00pm in San Francisco and I’m sweating. I keep telling myself the same stories over and over again. I’m here sitting in traffic, rocking back and forth on this loose seat in this old van moving psychic shit around. I think things are going to work out, push my weight into the brake pedal, lean back, and put the truck in park. I unbuckle the seat belt and push my toes into the floorboard. I tighten all the muscles I’m aware I feel until my legs cramp up. I need more potassium.
What if this floorboard wasn’t a floorboard? I’m a bed of blooming flowers. The floor board is cake and shit. The floor board is a shit cake and I could push my feet through it. I don’t need anything anymore. I could just take my shoes and sox off and dig my feet through the floor. I could wiggle them in slowly while I stare into the sun. The feeling of slicing through a slice of tiramisu while on vacation with my parents. And slide my whole body through the texture and olfactory bliss of pheromones and fruit juice, flowers and eggs, until I was on the street, crouched and shit-stained, naked.My middle class clothes lost on the passage. I would lay down then, on the warm asphalt and look up at an old engine turning. Listening to the sound, smelling the burning fuel. Laying still.
But life is not this easy. I can only sit here stretching and relaxing my legs on the floor board of this old truck. Thinking about how much energy it takes to step out of this truck. I’m slouching, also thinking about how much energy it takes to leave my house every morning. I sit up straight. If I was walking down the street I’d be experimenting with the way my hands feel in different pockets. I’d peel my cuticles in the hand that was swinging. I’d wonder if people could see my lack of self awareness. I can’t understand the value that definition adds to an object. I’m melting to a flowing puddle of abstract mass.
I look up and see a man in a wheelchair. I watch him wheeling himself across the street. He moves with strength and conviction, and the grace of a graceful song that has made me cry. The light turns green. I drive past him watching as he pulls a cell phone out of his pocket, smiling sending a text, and never veering off course.
There is something that I’ve always liked about this job and it’s that this truck is old and dusty and smells like a truck my dad once drove. When I was a kid my grandfather had a ranch and we used to drive out there in that truck every weekend. I could be driving out to the ranch if I closed my eyes and just kept breathing. There could be a gun under the backseat. Remington .308 model 700 with a bore barrel and a wood stock, the kind snipers use. We could be going hunting. I could be a kid.
I was once on a long drive in this truck, feeling real alone. I pulled over at a gas station and bought a beer. I wanted to see if I could recreate the feeling of the foolishness that drove me through my youth. I cracked it open and held it between my legs, didn’t drink any, but I did litter in Oregon.
There was a time that that was what I wanted to grow up for. If I had to pray It would be to ask for a ceaseless yearning for that feeling of freedom — fake and stupid. I could roll like that man, liberated by breath and expression, confined in existence. Never wishing, never free.
I’m on the highway now, almost home.
