It was hard to imagine, given the extended stretch of asphalt traveled, that six hours of driving could pass without notice. Previously, the silence between CDs would have announced each hourish block, but it seemed my iPod had yet again made consciousness unnecessary. Still, the stocky fields outside my window confirmed my location within the agrarian sealand of Illinois, if not an errant wormhole somewhere between Michigan and St. Louis (the sort a traveler may enter with less noticeable effect than the conclusion of the
Downward Spiral album).
I awoke from the locomotive trance at the very limit of my tanks, one of which warned of its emptiness; the other, the opposite. The tiny illuminated pump triggered a momentarily forgotten fuel paranoia, and for the first time in hours I consciously navigated. (Steering felt labored and unnecessarily involved.) It was not without relief that I finally idled into a grime-coated gas station, certain that every combustive cacophony was actually that last sputterance of propulsive fume.
As my vehicle suckled the enemy of the state, I turned my attention to other social pressures. I cursed my haste. In my eagerness to avoid toting the red plastic icon of roadside shame I had managed to discover a locale of unique disrepair. The hose handle held its requisite stratus of viscous grease, of course (the stuff transferred almost immediately to French fries in transit); the station itself was a wonder of muck. It was a beautiful building, really, probably built in that hopeful postwar time when cars first became an accessible luxury and Eisenhower's pavers assured wide-eyed passage to hotspots like Dallas and Des Moines. It hoisted tentative bits of ornamental indulgence that sidestepped architectural modernism entirely. The bricks were (I guessed) coated in a multi-hued enamel. Their natural variations gave a deliberately patchwork appearance, with no pattern but conscious placement, as though our bricklayer had decided 1956 was the year to embrace his inner artist. The flat tar roof was crowned around its edges with a series of staggered swirls. These undulations peaked at a central summit which coiled upon itself in mirrored spirals, as if cast by a dual-nozzled soft serve concrete dispenser. This ordinarily remarkable extraordinariness was almost totally doused by time, as the building had wound itself in an ever darkening cocoon of soot and other atmospheric smegma. Normally, urban decay -- even to this extent -- held a bit of
wabi-sabi charm, but as I considered my practical concerns with relief, the besplotched skunk palace proved an ineptly named and wholly undesirable comfort station.
A geyser of civility and masochism required me to soldier on, toward funk's gaping maw. And since I drew my motivation from the same source that flung me into an unfamiliar dentist's chair -- tooth objecting, hammered by the immediacy of throbbing pain -- I decided to employ a similar method of discomfort management. I had read in a magazine years back about self-induced trances. The author, smithing as though she were the first to introduce the concept, expounded on the virtues of a light trance for dealing with disquieting situations. The sidebar described the process of self-induction as visiting a "happy place".
Mine was an island untouched by dentistry.
It was just before sunset in the South Pacific, and in the warm evening nature began to assert its mastery of gradients. I cast a long shadow as I walked parallel to the water, in that borderland breached by only the most ambitious and frothy waves. I followed a meandering, invisible line of ideal surface density and two dogfighting gulls followed me.
I could regulate my comfort with the slightest deviation toward sea or sand. There was an subtle art to it, I found, absorbing the tiniest of stimuli through the otherwise calloused barrier of my sole. It reminded me of finding that perfect blanket coverage on a brisk autumn night; how an inch more or less of exposed skin modified my core temperature perceptibly. And the act of such focused regulation was itself a Zen exercise. To pay that much attention to the minutia of the physical body had a delightfully counterintuitive result: elevation to an isolated, ethereal plane. I was in a warm, comfortable place, my feet told me, where I was finally free to release the pent up pressures of fear, regret, and self doubt.
I stopped for a moment and pressed my hands palm-down into the surf. The water baptized my wrists with a shock of cleansing, exhilarating refreshment. As I hunkered over the waves, a seaweed-laden overachiever deposited its snotty biomass around my bare foot and ankle. For a moment the greenish batwingy fibers wrapped in lock-step, then tumbled into flight, end over end, flung by my less-than-graceful kick.
The clump slapped against -- then slipped off -- the service station's restroom doorknob, leaving the tarnished brass bulb to glisten with an unidentifiable moisture (pray condensation). I paused. Above the knob was mounted a long-forgotten bathroom cleaning schedule, a relic of once meticulous attention, like so many blogs enthusiastically created and woefully left to decay. It read ...
8-05-05 TC
8-09-05 TC
8-11-05 JH
8-18-05 JH
9-06-05 TC
9-14-05 TC
3-30-06 JH
... then abruptly stopped.
