a trucker's view on the 2020 Presidential Election

I'm a trucker. Call it exposition. You got me. It's also the truth, and that has to count for something these days.

Yep, just a plain-spoken trucker. Steve by name. A simple man. Not a particularly hopeful or intellectual or depressive man. Kind of just a guy who shows up and does his thing. In my case trucking.

And sometimes: philately. A quaint hobby, an old-timey one. But it brings me peace, it quiets the war upstairs. All that artistic intent and goodwill on a tiny adhesive square.  It's hard to put a stamp on an envelope or in a book made just for it and then blow your fucking brains out. It would be hard for me to. And I like to put a lot of road between me and that kind of thing.

Plain spoken trucker. Don't much go in for talking politics, and more likely to let my fists do that particularly conversing. But when I picture the 2020 election I picture it like this:

I'm driving in dense fog, just before dawn begins creeping in, or maybe midnight. Definite: I can't see a single fucking thing ahead of me. Ahead of me there is a little bit of a glow, a smidge more than the usual glow on a foggy drive. A premonition so sluggish I'll get there before I decipher it. It might be some dumbfuck city nobody gives a rat's dick about flickering its last dumbshit bad idea of the evening off in the distance. It might be the gathering light of dawn. It might also be the glow of a fire from the most fearsome wreck Kentucky (? someplace) has ever seen.

What I know: I've got the music up to keep awake and I've got to keep driving or I'm going to be too late. And it'll be my third/fifth/whatever strike. But the road just keeps going, and there aren't any signs I trust. The fog is formless and from sleep deprivation it's also playing its own tricks. Like there are these fucking white coyotes and small-assed untidy polar bears running zigzags from the corners of the windshield.

Maybe that glow is nothing but hallucination in itself. Maybe I'm driving toward the edge of a flat earth, and past that final fake mile marker it will be nothing but the void of space.

In that final moment: one last sip of blatantly terrible styrofoam cup coffee, and a silent but highly enthusiastic scream.

cascading closed worldview

Barbed wire gloves and a bulletproof  visor and a thick mask and superobviouscompletelynonaerodynamic ear plugs. The latter not because I think that COVID shit's going to get in through my ears more that I don't want to hear what you have to say or even pretend to listen. If I see you on my side of the street I'll smile sideways at you no eye contact and cross to like 12 or 18 feet away to avoid being reminded of whatever point of connection there might be links you to I. If there are cars in either or both directions I'm willing to take my chances. I and not thou; taking special care to avoid special you.

In all this quarantine loneliness for a while I went around town leaving chalk messages for folks: You Got This! Motivational speeches spanning blocks targeted to the people I knew and loved. Then the same types of messages increasingly targeted to people I did not know or know whether I loved.

Then I started in on more ambivalent messages. Cheer up: civilizations die! If they didn't then new ones couldn't be born. Lucky numbers 20, 20, 5...

Then I decided that language itself was too clear whatever layers and rotations of irony I threaded through. I started in on geometric drawings full of noise and without symmetry, devoid of clarity. My hope was to freeze people in their tracks; to interrupt the interpretative process. If we all stay in one place, even if do so having made the cardinal mistake of ever going outside, the odds of transmission decrease significantly.

To be clear, the barbed wire gloves are in case anybody ever tries to shake my hand, I'll do it and then hack off both of my own hands for microbiological safety using a device designed solely for that purpose right after. I just want to leave a reminder or set of reminders if you will that such things as physical contact are unsafe and we're in distinctly more of an adapt or die situation, buddy.

I managed to avoid Walmart for the first couple months of this shit but I got there today because honestly there aren't a lot of other go-tos for DVD-R discs in the apocalypse. Place was hopping! But also big enough that it wasn't purely terrifying, except for the moment close to checkout when I imagined no felt no was certain that COVID-19 was crawling around behind my glasses and directly into my eyes. And the people, I don't know how to put it any other way, they were just distinctly nicer than they are at Wegman's.