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November 12, 2002  Dateline - Behind the Wheel Approaching Winnie, TX Kittie, Kittie, poor possum flat. My friend's little girl is queen of the rats. Driving now, the back road to Houston, the non-ferry route, chose to take it for a change of pace, scenery, all that. And perhaps also because I'm finally past the fear & loathing I felt when, following Cricket's nay-vote and a cattle trough of tears, I drove this road last. Spindletop Bayou. Rice radio plays Ennio Morricone. F. Peter Larsen. Anahuac. Future site of the Winnie Church of Christ. East Chambers Elementary, the sign a giant box of crayons. I'm an eBay junky, there can be no doubt. I look at all these roadside Nowhereville junk shops and I see eBay dollar signs. It's gotta be a sickeness. I'll put it on my application for government disability. Ahh! The I-10 again! An invitation to speeeed! Big trucks, white lines, billboards, traffic cones, half a prefab home on a flatbed truck by the side of the highway.. Civilization! Yesterday i found an abalone shell, a big one, pretty oil-slick rainbow looking colors, and the first thing that popped in to my mind was ASHTRAY! G-ma and G-pa McKinney, hell half the damn clan smoked around us kids at the old cottage and there it was, the abalone shell, traveled far and wide and into the woods of NH to achieve the zenith of its calcified destiny: Ashtrayism! The next thing I saw on the beach was an old car battery, right there, washed up among the seashells on this little island rookery of pelicans, cranes, battery acid birds, who knows. Stuckey's interstate eats comin up. Two eggs, toast and jelly, only 99 cents! The sun shines fine, the white-washed blue sky that color at the bottom of an empty swimmin' pool and its November, whatever that means anymore as I run with the temperate climate, the sphere of weather and air around me like some temporary autonomous zone i've chosen as home, for now. Fuck sweating in the humidity of southern summer. Fuck freezing yer balls off in northern winter. Turtle Bayou. Big T Trailers. A Ford dealership and i think of Duke and how Cricket and I celebrated Duke's birthday together on the road when the old boy flipped back to all zeros again and where of all places but right beside a Ford dealership out in the middle of nowhere on the outskirts of San Antonio at midnight or so and all the joy and pride I should have felt and kinda did but it was all watered down by the total fatigue of two hard days of packing and prepping the vehicle and driving. And damn Duke for shittin' the bed from that moment forward. Or damn me for not being a good enough mechanic to have properly installed that new/old junkyard engine and lost that little needle integral to the carburetor's performance. Fuck it. I don't wanna think about it NO MORE you EMPTY-HEADED FOOD TROUGH WATER! There's a Monty Python quote suitable to every occasion, doncha think? Like Sir Bedevere's backward logic when he confirms a villager's deduction that "if she weighs the same as a duck, then she's made of wood... and therefore she's a witch." Laugh away at the silliness of these dark age nutballs, but answer your phone, as i just did here behind the wheel, and have a little chat with a representative of the Social Security Administration. To these people, very small rocks do float in water and ducks are made of wood. Oh, and run the treadmill of their crazy-making application process long enough and you will be turned into a gnute. Downtown Houston's Camelot-like vaulting castle skyline coming into view now. Oil money. Maxam Corporation. Evil ruiners of the last redwood forests 2000 miles away. Traffic slowing. Joe's Crab Shack. Whataburger, 3 miles ahead. Don't let the fact that SS is a federal agency fool you. This is still the "United States" where every state is sovereign, or more aptly put, full of its own peculiar quirks, rules and labrythian bureaucracies. But let me not get too political, for indeed I know diddly squat about politics. What I do know is the heartrending pain of standing face to face with a clearcut miles across. I know the frustration and mental discord of climbing ladders with invisible, randomly-spaced rungs, a kind of metaphor for the struggles of anyone with any disability to get ahead, to make a buck, to get the simple things of life they need. Am I disabled? Not compared to the guy in the wheelchair. Not compared to the girl with CP so bad she can't hardly speak a word and her pretzel-spindly contorted body imprisons a good mind. But compared to anyone who can get through a normal day without tears, who can watch TV or exchange idle conversation about simple domestic issues without getting THE FEAR, who can drink a few too many beers and wake up hungover but spiritually fine, then yes, I am disabled. Because in the latter example there, I wake up wanting to die. And that's an exaggerated state, I mean having drank the night before. I have plenty of sober days where the same sense of total hopelessness pours over me like a bucket of boiled pig fat off some castle wall under siege. Ahh, but fuck it. I don't wanna talk about that anymore, either. So then the question hangs: what do you want to talk about, Rick? What do you write about, Rick? I don't know. Lunch at the Pig Stand on Washington. "Aurora's Booth" the gold framed placard above me reads. "In Honor of Shirley MacLaine and Larry McMurty and The Evening Star." How about that? I'm sitting right where ole Shirley plopped down her movie star ass and dun got film-atated, or ulated, or ulized. Whatever. Can't top the erotic sensation I once got from standing right where Jodi Foster stood in the film Contact before that long line-up of breathtaking 'deep space earphone' satellite dishes at New Mexico's Very Large Array. I dunno whether it was my forever longing heartache for Jodi or those daunting, 100-foot diameter dishes whistling in the high winds out there that turned me on so.  Way out there in the middle of nowhere, NM, the perfect place to achieve the necessary quietude to hear the whalesong of distant stars singing in the vast night sky and laying bare the lies and petty little concerns of this tiny blue planet and its ant-like assemblage of idiots with bombs and itchy trigger fingers just waiting, just waiting, for 59 years now waiting to make that last big barrage of blasts to end all blasts, that full-scale nuclear exchange that most of us will never even hear let alone see coming, but that way out there in the womb of space will sound not unlike the tiny, tap-tap-tapping of a telegraph transmission, which when it's over and some curious Jodi Foster alien on the other end figures it for a sign of intelligent life elsewhere in space and takes it to her boss and her boss' boss and all the way to the top, their wise leader will put his ear to the recorded sound, listen, and without hesitation proclaim, "Nope. No intelligent life there." -His Lordship RSM the Duke of the Jodi Foster Fan Club More from the Texas gulf coast
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