Asleep at the wheel...

Apr 26, 2023

There are moments when my conscious mind cuts away from all sensations. Severs ties with stimuli. When I succumb to movements worn smooth. An alarm, a time-clock, a leash. Gradual removal and fatigue. The same road, the same distance, the same motions. A to B and then repeat. I punch in, I punch out. I take the call. Reply to all. I say my lines. I leave.

I feel the pavement pushing back against the wheels. The excesses of traffic-loading deforms the subgrade. The surface depressions create maps of wear. I am adrift and tread-bare.

I put one foot in front of the other. Pass one day after another. I wait for the signals. I follow the signs.

Asleep behind the wheel.

"Sometimes we get what we hope for", Seth Godin says. "Often, we get what we tolerate." More often than not, we get neither. We sit with what we can't stand. Some of us have never had the luxury of landing on our feet.

For most of my life I’ve been an unwilling passenger. Silent, but disquiet. Thirty-nine miles of regret per gallon. An unresting heart beating against the glass. Looking out at where I left. Watching what’s gone by. Staring in the rear view.

“[T]he very reason I write,” Zadie Smith says, “is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.” It’s the way I wake up, the way I move. It is motion along a curve. Kinetic energy across a line. Translation and rotation. A path around a point. It is the means by which I discover what I think and what I have to say. It is clarifying and generative. It makes me who I am. Makes me someone I want to be.

These words are the forces that act upon me. Refusing to leave me at rest. They are displacement. Distance. Velocity. Acceleration, and speed. A shift in orientation. A change within time and position, a change within location, a change within space, a change within me.

No matter how lulling the road is, it’s the writing that’s driving me.

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