A few words about my commute: it’s killing me. If you don’t believe it, ask any of the anonymous near corpses suffering alongside me, their anger and impotence creating a morbid energy inside all these windshields. Let me put it another way: if my job entailed having sex with Swedish super models three-to-five days a week, at triple my current salary, I’d still wrestle with whether to willingly mire myself in this mess.
Maybe the commute causes cancer. It certainly feels like it, it’s certainly causing something. Carrying stress in the jaw, not to mention my neck, my knees, my nuts.
Everyone knows, now, that road rage can kill you—or at least cause you to kill someone else (usually the asswipe who swerved into your lane and then slammed on the brakes, just to let you know he’s there), so people are trying to control themselves, curtail those carcinogens, and the result is several thousand ass-cracks shut tighter than a cherrystone clam.
This commute is Pavlov, I’m a dog (that woman who just cut me off is a bitch), and a shot of bourbon is my bone. Or a beer. Or some vanilla extract, if that’s all that’s available. Look: as soon as this moonwalk of machinery grinds the gears of congestion, the first thing I can think of is how badly I want a drink. What the hell else am I supposed to do? It’s better than some of the options other people choose, like cuddling up with a couple of quarter pounders, or (the other extreme) running to jump on the treadmill, or biting a hole in the tongue or ulcerizing holes in their heart, or kidnapping and killing the kids from the milk cartons, or (the horror) going to church.
This is my life: welcome to the occupation. College already an unattainable memory, the farthest car back in my rear view mirror, all of us going nowhere fast, a million tons of muted machinery. We have to stick together, socialize to survive, roll with the punches or become road kill.
The sweet smell of manure holds sway. The hills are alive; at least the deep green and nervous grass seems to be, eager to stretch out and show the world what it’s been up to all summer, sensing the cold nights coming, afraid of hunkering down, dying and waiting in line to be reborn in the spring.
The fuck are you staring at? I hiss at the stranger staring at me in my rearview. Oh, wait, that’s me.
I’m not sure what I’m staring at, exactly, but it’s definitely not healthy.
Quick catalog: eyes too honest—or too surprised—to lie about what they behold; dark patches of hair in all the wrong places; sagging shoulders that seem to point in different directions; a lethargic slouch from hours spent slumped in office chairs and twisted around myself in nervous nights trying to sleep.
I wish there was some sort of spa I could enter—somewhere where all the CEOs go so that they can emerge, actually appearing human, although we all know they’re not fooling anyone.
I, on the other hand, could come out my old self again. Or, at least go all the way over to the other side and run with the pack where the wild things are. Where the law of the jungle is clear: kill anything you can, subsist on everything smaller than you are, all parties understanding it’s nothing personal, it’s strictly business.
The business section looks up at me, as if it’s actually innocent of the crimes everyone commits each day in its name.
Each day I read a little bit less of the newspaper. I’ve been through the cycle, it seems: starting with the comics, then moving up to the sports pages, then slowly grappling with the local news, then the arts and entertainment and finally, after college, world news. Nothing changes except this one constant: everything gets worse, always. It’s nothing personal, the world seems to say. It’s strictly business.
I recall, in high school, being vaguely afraid of the random sociopaths who may or may not have concealed switchblades in their skin-tight jeans (no one, to my knowledge, ever did) and mostly I was just afraid of getting my ass kicked. Until a few years ago the height of high school anxiety, for males, was getting beaten up in the locker room, in front of all the girls you beat off to. How endearing, how outdated. Now, you have to pass through a metal detector and armed S.W.A.T. teams patrol the hallways. And that’s just the nursery schools.
This is why movies are so miserable and no one bothers to buy books, if they ever actually did: because no work of imagination is ever going to equal the show playing outside, everywhere, inside, all the time. The world is a blockbuster and the final cut can never occur because there’s no budget and we’ve lost count of the cast.
You hear about embittered old burnouts who hang their Sunday papers in effigy, sacrifices to the gods that failed them, worn down by the information overload we’ve created (in our own image). If you’re lucky enough to actually live a long life, you’ve inherited the accumulated burden of memories: all that suffering, all those mysteries, all the injustice, all this pain. It only gets worse so you ask yourself eventually, inevitably: why did I bother?
So I’m reading a little less, each day, of the newspaper. I’m beginning to suspect that I’ll just cut out the middle man of middle age and stop reading altogether. A preemptive strike; apathy before annihilation, don’t let them take me alive, cash in some of this awareness for sweet, beautiful bliss.
*Excerpted from my novel Not To Mention a Nice Life, available June 17.
