a drive upvalley

i leave the house, plenty of time, i think.

——

eventually the brigade of the white trucks and vans queues.

go to where the money is, they say.

yet i see the expressions on their faces:

some maybe doing it out of a duty for generations to come.

they are usually from the south.

some are just doing it for the paycheck, and those you can tell

they are from here.

some of them identify with thier big ass trucks, annoucing how much they love america, or trump, or how biden can go fuck himself, even some of them having a custom license plate that says they hate the government. yet they paid extra to them to announce that opinion. kind of a wash, don't you think?

——

i think sometimes, looking up at the sky at an airplane passing by, that there is a cabin full of stories: people traveling on vacation, some for work, some perhaps to say goodbye to a dying family member, some to welcome new life into their worlds, some of them drinking before noon because they hate their life, some moving away from abuse and starting anew, some young adults traveling for the first time alone. and they are thirty thousand feet above me, passing by as i look up. and we just accept this and never really marvel at the whole thing.

such is the highway. all of us in our little boxes, all of us have our own hopes and dreams, plans for the future that will never pan out.

 ——

my son sleeps for half of the trip, and then pokes his head up:

what makes waves?

well, the moon is a factor. have you ever heard of high tied and low tied? that is when the ocean is closer to the moon and it pulls the water from the earth towards it. and then sometimes waves are made by the wind. and then there is something called a rouge wave, that kind of does it all by itself.

 ——

we all pretty much process in the queue together. there are some, most likely in their aforementioned trucks, that try to weave in and out, jockeying for position. and then the stop lights hit, and i pull up next to them. this probably angers them even more. maybe if we all went the same speed, i think, it would go faster. but is that the talk of a socialist? influenced by the bumper stickers perhaps.

i imagine the folks upvalley are sleeping in, or most likely, not even at their residence. regardless, they are waiting for their service to come, the extension on the house to be built, how lucky are they? but the truth is that they have their own problems. they just may look a bit different than the downvalley trash.

 ——

is the outside of your truck waterproof?

do you mean like from rain, or if the truck ended up in a lake or something? if we are in a lake, yeah, but then you would have to brake the window with your foot, and then swim out. but we could breath for a little bit.

why can't you just open the door?

because water has a lot of pressure when you are underwater. that is why submarines are designed like they are and made out of strong steel. the water could crush a lot of things.

i am trying. they aren't the best explanations, but do i really want to get into the structural plate designs of submarines, of the equations that i did in undergrad and grad school? maybe that is what he wants? the answers are always complicated. my mind races toward the complicated and then tries to simplify it. part of me does this to make him try to understand, part of me does it hoping that it will satify him and stop the river of questions.

 ——

the killer is the double stop light at buttermilk. and then it merges to one lane. once i am passed that dreadful mark, i am golden. my son needs to be on the ice in fifteen minutes. cut it close this morning. one more day left of this fucking drive,

which, in all reality, isn't so bad.