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.
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