I focus on moving parts and their forward momentum along their past-present-future trajectory. Watching a not-great movie affords me the same drug as driving. Whenever I get behind the wheel of a car, it’s, “I could drive to the grocery store or to California.”Īnd that’s why I love not-great movies. The ever-present tension is gone because I’m gone. Driving - focusing on moving parts that could transport or kill me - takes me out of my body. I feel my muscles go a bit slack and crank up the panic to resist the loosening, and then I puke. I was an abused kid I’ve lived a tough life. “Relax” is the most useless piece of unsolicited advice anyone has ever given me. I calculate whether I can gain three inches on him. I draw on my psychic powers to predict what that asshole in the blue Ford is going to pull next. In seconds I glance out the windshield, the rear view mirror, the driver’s side view, the passenger’s side, and run all four views through my mind as if I were a geek, slide rule in hand. Within five miles, I have forgotten he exists. I accelerate the flimsy strand evaporates.
Assumptions about his home life and his voting patterns flood my brain these assumptions are inspired by his speed, the filthiness of his truck, and the baseball cap and beard I glimpse through his windshield. The weird conviction that we are united in doing something important must contribute to that wacky cause-of-death, road rage.Īn eighteen-wheeler has been on my ass for the past ten miles. That something that unites us is as temporary as a ballet pose it’s as easily snapped as a spider’s strands.
A background conviction floats somewhere in my brain: I am part of some larger pattern weaving together all these characters and their fleeting missions. In my seventeen-year-old rice burner, surrounded by complete strangers, I and others jostle urgently as if mobbing the gates of heaven we are all on the same trajectory, the only one available to any of us: from the past, in the present, toward the future. My ears tune out extraneous sounds and tune in the br-bump br-bump of tires over pavement seams. The Unique Rewards, and the Unexpected Sophistication, of a Not-Great Movieīody rhythms - blood pressure, breath - fall into the swooshing caress and percussive thunk of the windshield wiper. Thoughts While Watching Sweet Home Alabama
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