Saturday, May 24, 2008

The Commuter

        “Write about what you know, and you can’t go wrong,” my old teachers would tell me. I’ve gone wrong lots of times, and had I stuck to their golden rule, I would have run out of things to write about by now. But now that I’m 30, I know a few more things, and can return to the old rule for a moment. One of the things I know about now is work. Like most people my age, I’ve spent the last twelve years of my life making other people rich. People I’ve never met: people I don’t want to meet. I don’t intend to shove my résumé down your throat, so don’t get all excited about it. Actually, what I intended to do is share my commute with you.
        I don’t get up at the crack of fucking dawn, like the radio jocks imply all day. FM radio was made for nine-to-fivers I guess; FM radio is dead to me anyhow, so what the hell do I care? I start out at noon, and it’s not ‘cause I’m lazy. I happen to work nights. The most I ever hear of the peppy “Lunch Bunch” set is maybe a syllable of a Jolly John used car ad, which, if you’ve ever heard one, you know is more than enough to make you want to kill yourself.
        So, like I said, I leave my place at noon. I drive by the old lady with the perpetual yard sale, the house with the barking dog, and sometimes, depending on the weather, the old man who spends all day making love to his vinyl fence, with Windex. Shit, imagine Windexing a fence. I’m morally opposed to vinyl fences. Pretty soon even Tom Sawyer will be Windexing the fence and nobody will remember what paint is.
        Every so often the people who own the dirt road I live on pay a bunch of rednecks to come and fill in the potholes with dirt. Last spring, the owners sent a letter claming that the new dirt was “special” and would last longer. Special must mean more expensive, because my lot rent went up by ten bucks a month too. Ten bucks don’t sound like a lot, but that’s 120 bucks a year I could be spending on better stuff than dirt. The special dirt, by the way, didn’t last any longer than the regular dirt, and the potholes were back, bigger than ever, by mid summer. Shocks and struts are two things I could be spending that 120 bucks on.
        The road to the main road isn’t bad; it’s all downhill and not much happens there. You’d think I would know the name of the damn street, but I don’t. One day I hit a cat on the hill that goes to the main road. I stopped and looked around for the owner, and all that came of it was practically givin’ an old man a heart attack for no reason when he thought it was his. Turns out, it was nobody’s cat and I ended up leaving it in the woods behind a dumpster. I didn’t know what the hell to do with it. What would you do with it? I’m sure you have some great ideas now, but at the time, you wouldn’t have known either.
        Anyway, down at the stop sign, at main road, there’s enough room for two cars to stop side by side: cars turning left across traffic, and cars simply turning right. I turn right. I’ll be damned if every day I don’t get stuck behind some jackass who sits in the middle and waits to turn left. To make things worse, people turning left off the main road sometimes try to pull a Mother Teresa and wave on the person turning left from the stop sign. The only trouble is, they don’t have the authority to say when it’s safe, because cars are rushing past them while they’re waiting to turn. I’ve seen some close calls at that stop sign.
        After the stop sign, I drive passed a pharmacy, two gas stations, and a McDonald’s. The line for the drivethru at McDonald’s sometimes spills into the street. You know you’ve got problems if you end up in that line. How fucking stupid is that? - Blocking traffic so you can get a fucking Happy Meal. I don’t eat that garbage at McDonald’s, but I do get a coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts.
        Before I turn in to the Dunkin' Donuts parking lot, I count how many cars are in the drivethru. If there’s three or less, I join them, but if there’s any more than that, I go inside. There can be as many as fifteen cars in the drivethru and it never occurs to any of them to go inside. On days like that, I go inside, get my coffee and then drive by the line outside to showoff my coffee. I don’t always win at Dunkin’ Donuts though. It’s a gamble either way. The other day I spent 17 minutes behind some prick in the drivethru who thought it was cool to order a dozen fancy drinks. I swear, some people order the wrong shit on purpose just so they can have something to bitch about. I get the same thing everyday: medium coffee with cream and one sugar.
        My next stop is the gas station. Everyone’s bitching about gas these days, but not everyone has the right to. If you’re stupid enough to buy a big truck or SUV, suck it up. Ten years ago, gas was around $1.00 a gallon. Now, it’s $4.00 a gallon. That’s a 400% increase. So, when I’m 40, I plan on paying $16.00 a gallon. I don’t know about you, but my pay certainly hasn’t quadrupled in the past ten years. If I make $8.00 an hour and my car gets 30 miles per gallon, I’m spending $8.00 an hour to drive at 60 mph; I’m spending more to drive my car per hour than I’m making at work per hour, and that doesn’t seem right.
        The first thing I see once I’m on the highway is a line of shiny blue State Police cars, sitting in a row in the “authorized vehicle’s only” strip between the lanes. There must be half a dozen of them, waiting like cowards for people traveling north to crest the hill. I push my car to about 100mph for a mile or so after I go by. I see more shit on my ride to work than they’ll ever see sitting there. They could spread out and actually do some good, but that’s not what it’s about. It’s all about money. They steal it from the public so they can buy more shiny blue cars and make more money. Law enforcement is a business, not a service. I’m not on either side though. I don’t like the shitty drivers either, but at least they don’t usually cost me money, except for when they run into me.
        I put my car on cruise control, around 75mph, and watch the show. That’s what I call it, The Show: young drivers with loosely connected heads, old drivers with bad depth perception, dick heads with no patients. I watch it play out like a bad physical comedy. I don’t care enough to play their game. I just laugh at them and roll on. They will all get what they deserve; most of them are getting it already and don’t even realize it. I don’t have any control over any of that. I don’t care if they know it or not.
        After I get off the highway, I race up through a bunch of lights and usually make it to work on time. Sometimes I have a few minutes to sit the car and shuffle though my mail before I go in. Other times, I button my shirt on the way through the door. It all depends on the commute.