Commuting; or, why I have fashioned a necklace out of Valium which I lick periodically.

One of the unanticipated benefits of my daily commute is that I have eighty minutes a day to mull aspects of my life and my days in the corn over in my diseased mind and separate the chaff from the grain, in a manner of speaking. It's an eerily liberating experience, but often I find myself drawn into the unfolding drama that is my commute on Indiana 37 rather than entering a Zenlike state of freakish cosmic understanding. It's not hard to get distracted. One morning, I tailed a car for more than thirty miles because I'd convinced myself that the "salt of the earth" - read 'redneck mofo par excellence' here - driver of an enormous Ford F-350 was delicately applying makeup in his rearview mirror. To say I was entranced would be a grave understatement. I had to know: was he an 'autumn'? How much rouge can one apply while trying to balance a Camel on one's lips and drink a Mountain Dew, and does the beard-stubble interfere with proper brush stroking? Would he use a lip color that was self-sealing, or would he have to use a glossy sealant? Does he tweeze? What kind of eyeliner does one use for eyes of the "basset hound" variety? The show went on for nearly a half hour before I realized the truth: he was picking dead skin off his peeling face in horrid sheets using a pencil eraser as grip. I was, perhaps, more disappointed at that moment than I have ever been in the entirety of my life.

Well, save for when I bought that weird juice that claimed that I’d be able to grow ram’s horns in a month from a wandering mendicant. Man, I knew that crap tasted like storm-drain water – the dead leaves should have been a giveaway. If I find that ‘ho again, I’ll have to make certain to cut her from navel to neck. Shit, did I write that?

Last night’s schlep up I-37 found me and several other drivers – a man in a Chevy Lumina with a bumper sticker that read “God is Coming and Boy, Is She Pissed”, a woman in a Plymouth Sundance who clearly *ahem* enjoys Lilith Fair, and an elderly farmer with a German shepherd buckled in the front seat of his fire-engine red pickup – trying desperately to incense the driver of a Marsh Grocery 18-wheeler. So! This Marsh truck comes barreling up behind us – we, who were politely not tearing up the road and safely obeying reasonable speeds – at nearly ninety miles an hour. I’m in the right lane and the farmer and the Lilith Fair devotee were behind me, and the Lumina was pacing me in the left lane, and the truck tears right up to the Lumina’s bumper. I felt sure that I was about to witness the fire-drenched extinction of a fellow human. The Lumina couldn’t speed up fast enough and couldn’t change lanes because I, piloting Orhan, couldn’t slow down because I had the pickup and the lesbian behind me. The driver of the truck then begins to flail about in the cabin like he’d just smoked a bowl of the finest street-grade rock and screaming out the window for the Lumina to move out of his way.

Now, the sensible thing to do for me would have been to speed up precipitously for a moment to allow the Lumina to take my place. The driver of the Lumina looked at me through his window – he, a twentysomething like myself – lit a smoke and gave me the thumbs up. At that moment I knew

It Was On.

So, instead of doing the sane thing by letting this fine piece of Grade-A nutsack pass us, we slowed to 65 and formed an impenetrable barrier to his progress and, as I believe it is called, rode block on his crackah ass. It felt a little like playing “chicken” on the railroad tracks, a cheap way we used to toy with death as children (Haha, Mom! I never did that! Just kidding! *ahem*).

As the miles tattered past us, Truck Driver Dude’s eyes began to bug out of his skull and he started to weave erratically while flashing his high beams. On the side of his cargo vessel was a lovely bit of information which I, while trying not to shit in my pants, gleaned with my one bit of peripheral vision.

How am I driving? the sign asked. If you have concerns, please call X-XXX-XXX-XXXX. My Goal is Safety!

Since I didn’t feel that plummeting through space at ninety miles an hour whilst trying to push small, affordable, sensible vehicles containing twentysomething males into ditches filled with rancid runoff water was exactly “safe”, I called the number. A young woman somewhere in, like, frikkin’ North Dakota answered. She asked for his truck number and what his unsafe activities were, and I told her. I, of course, neglected to mention that we were intentionally egging him on because it made us giggle, but the rest is the Unadulterated Truth. She sighed pointedly. Apparently, unless the driver is raping a kidnapped underage hitchhiker with a bowling pin soaked in rubbing alcohol whilst “choking his bishop” and trying to drive at the same time, the Friendly Associate couldn’t give two shits.

I hung up and gave Mr. Twentysomething in the Lumina the “give it up” hand signal and we let the trucker thunder past at 120 MPH – which he did while laying on his horn the whole time he was passing us.

The sound of that horn was inspirational. If I can bring that much rage into someone’s life, I know I’ve done something worthwhile and that I’ve made a mark on the world.

Of course, part of that “mark” was a brownish smear left in my britches, but that’s what Jesus invented bleach for.


Until Friday, I remain,

Domonic