nervous tension

A frantic Kinks’ drumbeat kicks in the background. My teeth throb. How long has it been since I went to the dentist? Will I ever go again? Fuck if I know. I’m just thinking about the day ahead.

Supposedly, I’m meeting a lady at a bar in Raleigh. I have to drive two hours from work to get there. And then I still don’t know if she’ll actually show up or if she’ll be worth the long drive. She’s a blonde too. Uses bad grammar.

She does like good music. And apparently the booze. This could be good. Could be bad. I’ve given up really trying to figure it out beforehand. It ruins the surprise. It takes away from the chase. And hell, the opportunities come up so infrequently that, honestly, I can’t overthink them when they do.

I’ve already done one thing against my insane mindset. I shave my playoff beard. The Capitals are entrenched in the Stanley Cup run. And instead of keeping it, I shaved it. First impressions and all. If she’s a great gal, she wouldn’t have cared, right? Wrong.

I get done with work early. Caring less and less about the finished product is not a good thing. However, getting a life is more important to me at the moment. It’s easy for colleagues to scoff at my lack of passion. “Get out,” they say. “You don’t love it anymore, you should be in it.” Well, I do love it. So much so that I get ulcers looking at the shitty copy I get every day. The kind of stuff that used to get you fired, but now gets you protected. Guess if you are nice now, you advance. If you kick ass and stay surly, you get buried. Unless you know someone. Yeah, I’m bitter. But those colleagues can all go fuck themselves. They have wives and husbands and kids and lives outside the walls of the newspaper. I still don’t. I’m still living the life I was as a 25 year old. As a 30 year old. As a 35 year old. Now at 40. And my bitter ass still wants to believe one day it will be better. That journalism will prevail, despite the polls that say people don’t care. The laws that censor us a little more each day. One day we’ll wake up? Right? It’s not all about having a stupid fucking App on my smart phone tell me what to do. What to watch. What to buy. Who to like. Who to fuck.

I get in my car. Crank the engine. I look at the odometer. It read 32,234 miles. I’ve had this car less than a year. I love the road. It loves me back. Well, as well as a road can. Lucero’s “Tears Don’t Matter Much” blasts out of the speakers. It’s gonna be a good night. It can’t help but be.

The landscape on this drive is dreary. The sun is beginning to slip behind the horizon. A bright orange hue fills up the sky. It’s quite amazing. In the distance, farmers are finishing up whatever they’re doing today. I see three giant tractors going the other direction. I’m happy for them. And happy for myself that they’re not going my way. I don’t feel nervous. I know I will when I actually get to the bar we’re meeting at. It’s the way I am. I don’t think about such things until they are right in front of me. It’s a defense mechanism that has developed over the years. It used to be that I’d fret over things so much that when the actual event happened, I’d clam up from the pressure I’d put on myself. That led to an awful lot of disappointment early on in life. Not that the later years haven’t been chock full of the same feeling, but at least the buildup and release isn’t so bad anymore.

At some point, the green fields and falling down shacks give way to new expressways. I think about the days when I first moved here, 10 years ago almost to the day, when none of these roads existed. All travel from the rural outskirts to the “big city” was by small two-lane blacktops. Now, four, six and eight-lane behemoths are everywhere. That saddens me a bit. But just for a moment.

I pull into Raleigh. It’s a cool town, I figure. I never spend much time here. I see hockey games. Been shopping a few times. Covered a couple of events when I was still a reporter. Now? I’m meeting a lady. Will she be cool? Will she be smart? Will she be frightened of my crooked teeth? The seal has been broken. The nerves begin to pile upon themselves. I’m 15 minutes early. I decide that’s a good thing. Maybe I can get a shot of whiskey before she arrives. Calm the nerves. Stop the voices.

I park my car. I still can’t parallel park. Not a skill I’ve ever needed. Luckily, my little Hyundai fits in a place with no need for real skill.

The bar’s up ahead. I’m sweating a bit. I stop at the door. Staring at it for a moment.

“Here’s goes nothing,” I say to myself as I grab the door, swing it open and go inside.

Overanalyzing grammar

The road sign said “Caution: Water on road.”

To me, that means you can drive, just watch your ass. After about 10 minutes, I felt it meant otherwise.

I was driving about 45 miles per hour in the pitch blackness of Jones County, North Carolina. Not much is there when it’s light out. But tonight, after 20 inches of rain, there’s even less.

Blackness is what stands out the most. Occasionally, there’s a sliver of light reflecting off the ground. Or what should be the ground. Instead, it’s water. A lot of water. And that’s actually what’s making it even blacker out here than it normally would be. The black is reflecting off of the water, making it darker. If that’s possible.

After a bit, in the headlights you see movement. It’s where the road should be. Instead, it’s a flow. There’s a river going west to east across the asphalt. It looks about a foot deep. Which means it is probably much deeper. A couple of trucks about a ¼ of a mile ahead of me slow to a crawl and hit the water. Sending a huge cascade of waves my way. It’s interesting. I’ve never felt a wake inside of a car. Tonight, it will become a normal thing.

On the side of the road are trucks, cars and people. Either there is really ill-timed party going on out here, or people are quitting.

“I slow down and get behind a car and the two trucks. There seems to be some hesitation here. My feeling is “just go for it. Whatever happens, happens.”

Apparently, they feel the same as we trudge on.

This river across the road is different than the others. It’s faster. It’s higher. And on both sides, there is nothing but more water, seemingly higher than the road and me. I know this is some kind of optical illusion brought about by all this water and the headlights of a few cars and the pitch blackness of everything else. But it still makes me think of the four people who died this afternoon in a bunch of washouts by idiots driving too fast or in too-deep water.

Right now, I am one of those idiots. It’s just whether or not I’m going to see my brand new car flooded, me swimming, or not.

I vote for not in a really quick conversation with God. I haven’t been talking with the big guy upstairs as much as I did last year. I guess routine makes you forget about such things. I tend to do that. Fall into a pattern that keeps me from doing things that I should be doing. Much like writing. I know I need to do it every, single, mother fucking day. Yet, I skip sometimes. Which is really the old cliché -- it’s two steps backwards.

I have yet to finish anything I have started in over a decade. It’s kind of sad, really. A monument to a great starter, horrible finisher. I’d be the king of quality starts and no complete games in baseball, which makes me a perfect guy for Tony LaRussa. But, I’ve always hated that asshat. He just oozes smugness, and that’s the one thing about guys that annoys me the most. Even more than jarheads who want to go kill. But just slightly.

After my few words with the guy upstairs, I hit the water. I get going slowly and I feel my car shudder at the water. “Oh shit, I’m going to stall,” I think. So I give her a little more gas and she seems to steady herself. Just in time for the guy in front of me to slow down. Way down. I get near him and have to slow too. Down to 10 mph.

This ain’t good. I say out loud. Go asshole!. I pull into the other lane just to keep my car from drifting off the road. The river is going faster than I am at this point, and my car is started to become a boat. Finally, the guy must have woken up, or stopped texting his girlfriend and he lays on the gas. I follow suit, and I feel like Sulu or something from Star Trek. And I think, “Is Sulu really the right person to be feeling like right now?” Maybe Scotty?

My car shakes a bit, but regrabs the road and starts going again. Soon, we’re all out of the water. For now.

I feel lucky. And I’m happy I’m not in the red shark right now. Yes, she was bigger. But without a defroster, and an engine and tranny that overheated, this would have killed it. And officially she would have swam away.

Hell, maybe that would have been a better ending than some Marine buying her? But, of course, that means I would have had to stay in Jones County, North Carolina, as per my “I’ll stay where she breaks down” pact of a while ago.

I should have driven her to the “Free State of Jones.” At least then I may have found the hat. The infamous hat. I bet Josh has written about the hat. Somewhere in all of his scribbles, the hat has to be there. It’s a symbol of something, but I don’t know if either of us knows. And probably a symbol of something completely different for each of us.

God damn I overanalyze ever fucking detail sometimes.

Except for grammar and commas. Fuck grammar and commas. Mrs. Pleasant, I’m sure you’d enjoy hearing me say that…