With Sleep, All Things Are Possible
By Jon Konrath
A once-famous prophet said "It ain't easy livin' free" (Actually, I think Bon Scott from AC/DC said it) and that was long before the days when you had to pay to use a restroom in a gas station. I've heard of ancient Samoan tribes that found some genetically modified mushrooms that destroyed short-term memory, so life from that point on would resemble a bad McDonald's commercial, with no stress, worry, or ugly cranial scars. Their ritual long predates the advent of air traffic controllers, C++ developers, and political correspondents, but when you're driving halfway across the country to essentially press a reset button on a robotic assembly line used to package imitation Snuggies that were hand-stitched by child labor half a world away, the phrase "why" tends to knock around your head frequently, and you think about what search terms would best be plugged into google to find some of that South Pacific magic fungus. Anyway, I'm sure such a treatment would require ten years of FDA paperwork and throw a kink in vital supply lines, like stalling production of erectile dysfunction medication and toppling the multi-trillion dollar spam industry. And the fungus is probably protected by Sting and his rainforest freaks.
Caffeine, that's the drug for this trip, I thought, as I ran through the Kroger parking lot, clicking the rental car's beep-beep thing and trying to remember the make, model, color, or where I left the thing. If you're a three-year-old and you knock over a glass display case full of expensive and highly fragile watches, it's cute; if you're a 28-year-old computer repair geek who has been awake for over 70 hours eating nothing but pixie stick dust and extruded beef jerky product and you accidentally proposition a 17-year-old Miley Cyrus-looking cashier operating a bootleg Icee machine in the middle of Pennsylvania, it's a big deal. The Christian man's world is full of blatant contradictions that aren't meant to be understood by outsiders like me, even after a good week of sleep, which wouldn't be happening any time soon, according to the overflowing queue of urgency building in my Blackberry.
By the way, when a rental car place takes twenty minutes to get your name and address, and then hand-prints it on a paper contract with ten layers of carbons, make sure to beat the hell out of the car and leave it for dead and on fire in a ditch somewhere south of Armpit, Nebraska. If it's a huge chain that has everything barcoded, and scans your retina and gets you on the road in about 15 seconds flat, you can be sure they'll send the dogs on you in a big way if you do anything more malicious than stealing the owner's manual or using the ashtray. But the unprofessional places, the ones who have one illiterate crack-whore cashier on the busiest day of the year - they're begging for destruction. You've already paid the full price of the car in your grief, so the least you can do is drive it off a cliff.
Fourteen hours in a tiny Korean car watching the cornfields scroll by in an infinite loop gives you a type of deep introspection formerly reserved for CIA brainwashing tactics and extreme Jonestown-like religious reprogramming experiences where everyone ends up dead. My GPS, programmed with the voice of Harvey Keitel, barked that two hours of grief lay between me and the hotel where I had reservations. Luckily, a state line occurred between here and there, which make any complications with the Miley Cyrus clone easier to handle. And technically, I didn't proposition her. She seemed into me for some reason, probably because it didn't look like I worked at a speed shop draining oil pans all day. But that's no reason to stay locked up in some backwater gulag for ten years like Charlie Manson's understudy.
I limped to my beaten Travelodge motel room in Ohio, the scene of a thousand snuff films and seventies super-8 pornos, certain I'd require months of daily therapy, a complete vegan diet change, the sale of most of my possessions, and some kind of new age religious headbashing to counteract the hypnotic feel of a dozen hours of road noise drilled into my head. I took a lukewarm shower, watched an hour of some reality show about twelve women trying to date either Milli or Vanilli, I'm not sure which, and calmed down considerably.
- - -
Jon Konrath is a writer living in Oakland, California. His hobbies include aspartame and death metal songs about crop rotation. He can be found at rumored.com.
By Jon Konrath
A once-famous prophet said "It ain't easy livin' free" (Actually, I think Bon Scott from AC/DC said it) and that was long before the days when you had to pay to use a restroom in a gas station. I've heard of ancient Samoan tribes that found some genetically modified mushrooms that destroyed short-term memory, so life from that point on would resemble a bad McDonald's commercial, with no stress, worry, or ugly cranial scars. Their ritual long predates the advent of air traffic controllers, C++ developers, and political correspondents, but when you're driving halfway across the country to essentially press a reset button on a robotic assembly line used to package imitation Snuggies that were hand-stitched by child labor half a world away, the phrase "why" tends to knock around your head frequently, and you think about what search terms would best be plugged into google to find some of that South Pacific magic fungus. Anyway, I'm sure such a treatment would require ten years of FDA paperwork and throw a kink in vital supply lines, like stalling production of erectile dysfunction medication and toppling the multi-trillion dollar spam industry. And the fungus is probably protected by Sting and his rainforest freaks.
Caffeine, that's the drug for this trip, I thought, as I ran through the Kroger parking lot, clicking the rental car's beep-beep thing and trying to remember the make, model, color, or where I left the thing. If you're a three-year-old and you knock over a glass display case full of expensive and highly fragile watches, it's cute; if you're a 28-year-old computer repair geek who has been awake for over 70 hours eating nothing but pixie stick dust and extruded beef jerky product and you accidentally proposition a 17-year-old Miley Cyrus-looking cashier operating a bootleg Icee machine in the middle of Pennsylvania, it's a big deal. The Christian man's world is full of blatant contradictions that aren't meant to be understood by outsiders like me, even after a good week of sleep, which wouldn't be happening any time soon, according to the overflowing queue of urgency building in my Blackberry.
By the way, when a rental car place takes twenty minutes to get your name and address, and then hand-prints it on a paper contract with ten layers of carbons, make sure to beat the hell out of the car and leave it for dead and on fire in a ditch somewhere south of Armpit, Nebraska. If it's a huge chain that has everything barcoded, and scans your retina and gets you on the road in about 15 seconds flat, you can be sure they'll send the dogs on you in a big way if you do anything more malicious than stealing the owner's manual or using the ashtray. But the unprofessional places, the ones who have one illiterate crack-whore cashier on the busiest day of the year - they're begging for destruction. You've already paid the full price of the car in your grief, so the least you can do is drive it off a cliff.
Fourteen hours in a tiny Korean car watching the cornfields scroll by in an infinite loop gives you a type of deep introspection formerly reserved for CIA brainwashing tactics and extreme Jonestown-like religious reprogramming experiences where everyone ends up dead. My GPS, programmed with the voice of Harvey Keitel, barked that two hours of grief lay between me and the hotel where I had reservations. Luckily, a state line occurred between here and there, which make any complications with the Miley Cyrus clone easier to handle. And technically, I didn't proposition her. She seemed into me for some reason, probably because it didn't look like I worked at a speed shop draining oil pans all day. But that's no reason to stay locked up in some backwater gulag for ten years like Charlie Manson's understudy.
I limped to my beaten Travelodge motel room in Ohio, the scene of a thousand snuff films and seventies super-8 pornos, certain I'd require months of daily therapy, a complete vegan diet change, the sale of most of my possessions, and some kind of new age religious headbashing to counteract the hypnotic feel of a dozen hours of road noise drilled into my head. I took a lukewarm shower, watched an hour of some reality show about twelve women trying to date either Milli or Vanilli, I'm not sure which, and calmed down considerably.
- - -
Jon Konrath is a writer living in Oakland, California. His hobbies include aspartame and death metal songs about crop rotation. He can be found at rumored.com.
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