Joyrides

      I have always been told to look for the best in life. I have always been told to assume that the glass is half full, to assume a beautiful ending will grace tomorrow’s horizon, to assume that there is an old man on a cloud planning out my meaning in life and my inheritance to glory through eternity. But despite these stale, overused clichés that have been forced upon me, I have regretfully deviated from such convenient stabilities: a burden which has had a certain toil upon me that I simply cannot overstate. In a pseudo-violent correspondence with the earlier mentioned oppressions upon my individualism, I have instead formed theories to live by of my own. Such depressing lines are not worth their tangible weight in this soliloquy, so I shall, for now, push them into the dark corners of my mind with the stagnant regrets, dried up wishing wells and leaking water pipes. I have better things to do than to allow myself to rot in the crude, often foaming pool of imperfect (and often bordering on elementary) poetics that is my standard intellect, so I grab my keys and decide to go for a drive to ease my mind. I take my little white pills and enter the garage where my little white car resides.
      The concrete floor stings coldly against my bare feet so I make quickly into the front seat and shut the door behind me. As I start the engine, I recall just how important car drives have been to my sanity and its maintenance. I had always found solace from loneliness and from being enveloped in the numbing nostalgia that routinely composes my thoughts by taking useless drives through the open roads. I actually verified this safe haven by a brilliant mind when reading Douglas Coupland once. I do not, however, think this justification makes the act any less pathetic.


         The day that has expired in my wake was not an especially eventful chapter of my recent existence, of either negative or dare I say hopeful effect, but, when it all boils down, it is a matter of internal combustion, with convection from external sources meaning very little. Despite the hate for inner-city decorum that I have developed in the past months, a need for essential tools for maintaining existential protocol (being liquor, cigarettes, and other general nutritional items) forced a break in my recent customary cycles, as I found myself in the midst of an eccentric herd of Main Street’s Sunday afternoon grazers. While stalking the streets, cursing the fact that these purposeless loiterers had cost me a parking spot even with an earshot of my intended destination, I caught the overwhelming scent of cheap perfume and cheaper cigarettes in my nostril; I consider this mentionable because, even though only in my young adulthood (mid-twenties, if you were so intrusive to inquire), all of my senses seem to fail me more often than not. Gazing forward towards the odor’s source, I found feet before me, a young couple of somewhat substandard physical appearance: the girl apparently being an emaciated corner-worker (of at least casual frequency I would say) and, in her grasp, a man of much larger horizontal  proportion but whose height was only maybe three inches superior to his slag. Noticing his detectably prepubescent dirty mustache and predictable scowl, I made sure to depress my facial features, forming a scowl of my own, and staring his square in eyes, just to promote the notion that I’d gladly swap blows with him if he so desired.
    I am a peaceful individual, I really am, and have always preferred that conflict resolve itself within the padded walls of a peaceful armistice; it is just that I often find myself inclined to allow such preferences to depend on the opposition’s  approach to the situation at hand. I find myself in these heated circumstances more than most, I would say. This is solely due to the fact that I am an honest man: a good man, but an honest man, nonetheless. One can very well get away with a taste for blunt honesty as long as they lace each statement with hollowed compliments and routine flattery. I, however, am wholly against this concept, for I have never compromised the unique distaste for most flattery that I seemingly inherited at birth. In all of my years of occupying god’s green Earth, I have only once whole-heartedly accepted and appreciated a compliment. This unique happening occurred in my younger years when a female friend of mine told me that I could very well be a great writer, “the man who breathes life back into American literature,” she said. She quickly followed up the statement with saying that such a circumstance would depend on my letting go of the bottle and quit my habits of burning bridges. Skipping over the erroneous details, I can assure you that I burnt that exact bridge nonetheless, with having quit the girl and having forfeited the word soon after. I cannot help that I find myself apathetic to the pleasantries of casual exchange; I, myself, am not one to stop and smell the flowers, but instead do my best to ignore the trivial bystanders that frequent the outskirts my paths, which happen to exclusively include flowers. 
    Having finally arrived at my destination, proudly acknowledging to myself that neither of my feet had once landed on a single crack in the sidewalk as I entered the door, I wasted no time (as usual) in collecting my groceries. I always liked coming to this store for one particular reason: the lighting. So many public establishments have those bright white lights, the ones that invade every corner of your sight and illuminate every atrocity that lies within the human face. In place of the mentioned lighting, Gregory’s was often ran with no artificial lighting at all, with the sun’s rays often leaking through the building’s four windows (with the window on the front wall stretching across the store’s entire width), providing an orange hue to be bestowed upon the rather brown (perhaps beige or sienna, based on the day and, of course, lighting) interior. On an especially dark day or during the night, Gregory, the store’s owner, would turn on the lights, which, fittingly, were quite orange in their appearance, with one hovering over the cash register area and the other three suspended rather sporadically above the store’s remaining sectors. Having, in this time of contemplating the simple goodness of my surroundings, collected all my groceries and exchanged dry salutations with the pharmacist, paid for my items and headed home. This concludes the meaningless happenings of the day preceding my joy ride: it was, as I said, a day not worth mentioning.


    I depart from the garage and back into the darkness of a sinfully cold August midnight. As I become one with the unusually narrow highway, I begin to notice the street lights. I guess I had never paid attention to them, for I had absolutely no recollection of their presence, let alone their imposing stature and how they extend so predominantly over the assumedly appreciative pathways. To me they seem like watchers, shepherds of all who pass by. I begin to feel bad for these admirable sentinels, knowing that their duties must bring them extreme boredom, seeing as they oversee the same cars slowly creep by, nothing more, nothing less every day. As I see headlights approach me from a short distance, I feel the urge to host an entertainment of sort, fireworks if you will, for these watchers of the night. I quickly abandon the thought, knowing well that my co-star in the play would likely oppose the arrangement and its possible repercussions.
      Now empty-headed and without resolution, I take a left onto the street which extends west past the city's limits and into the lightless terrain. Growing warm with anxiousness, I progress past the stop sign at the street’s end and make my way through the memory-laced roads of a ravaged country side. I have traveled this course countless times before. Those were better times: times when God hadn’t vacated my faith, when an angel’s face still graced my bedside. I again rush the thoughts away, regain my composure, and focus on the winding road. Feeling warm and out of breath, I turn set my air conditioning to its maximum setting and attempt to drown out my thoughts by blaring my radio through the emptiness. Still out of breath, I open a window and let the thirsty August night have its way with my cheap, blue interior.
      Suddenly, in the midst of complete darkness, the sun appears in the upper-middle of my windshield. But, for some reason, it seems misshaped, almost like a pear, heavier at the bottom. As I press my foot to the floor and watch as my speedometer creeps past 100 miles an hour, I see her face. Coughing from the cars putrid atmosphere, I struggle to focus my eyes. As I gain focus, the landscape shifts and the road turns and winds into oblivion. There is only black surrounding me; the sun has somehow returned to its chambers to finish its dreams or perhaps violate its mistress. I find myself weightless in midair and somehow completely numb to the horror of what is happening.
      The humming of my car’s engine purrs through the emptiness of the garage. The light bulb hanging above the windshield peers on apathetically as the light within the car dies out. In the dwindling moments following my crash, I philosophize to myself. What do we do when the fire towards which we're aspiring goes out amidst the dirt and darkness? We swallow the dying embers left in our wake. Portia's right: stomach smolders, gut bottoms out. The exit light dims.