Turnpike

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FORMLESS, SOME KIND OF heart-bearing creature all sense and instinct, I’ve swum my life through a sea as black as the motivations that have driven me. Limpid reason, dulled at birth, has played so infinitesimal a part in my doings, that I cannot truly say it has ever sent me with the proper tides. Bumped and jostled and once or twice I have cleaved to another entity in that lightless ocean, sucked it dry of whatever it had, and floated away. If I knew, if I had the faintest idea why I do what I do, why a man such as myself — and God knows I’m anything but stupid — cannot find direction and ethic it might save me from tomorrow. Better still, from tonight.

But tonight began three days ago, and tomorrow is as inevitable as the way it started.

Riding high in the cab of a tandem-axle semi; underneath me twelve big overweight doughnuts out of Goodyear; behind me seventy billion uncounted ground-up Brazilian coffee beans mixed with some mocha java and a little Guatemalan, packed in double-foil bags with turndown closures guaranteed to keep the grind “brewpot-fresh” all the way from the loading dock in mid-Manhattan across the turnpike route to San Francisco, California, where “brewpot-fresh” coffee is treasured, worshiped, bought at the very highest mark-ups in specialty gourmet shops. As pushed — like a pea with the nose down all the highways of tomorrows — in a 12-wheel, tandem-axle etcetera by this heart-bearing creature, this Neil Danzig, this truck driver with the soul of Rimbaud.

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