Too Loud, Too Fast

Technically speaking, the driver of the white pickup truck didn’t do anything illegal. Hell, he didn’t even do anything that wrong.

Did he pull out from the cross street with my car closer to his than I would have done if positions were reversed? Absolutely. But I barely had to apply my brakes to avoid any unpleasantries. No “you-idiot” honk was warranted. In fact, I didn’t even give an “um-excuse-me” beep.

Instead, I just sighed.

Deeply.

The pickup truck rapidly accelerated, dirty gray and presumably odorous exhaust spitting out of the tailpipe into the frigid night, and I’d frankly just had had enough by that point. It was one of those times when everything about this planet just seems wrong.

Maybe no one else ever feels this way. Maybe this is a me thing. I have no idea. I have no one to talk with to share these thoughts, which I guess, in thinking about it, is part of the wrong I feel about this planet right now.

It’s not that things are going poorly in my life. They aren’t. Things are, in fact, quite good. So how can everything be seemingly good and seemingly wrong at the same time? Again, I don’t know. I have no clue. I got nuthin’.

What I know is that I feel like things aren’t supposed to be this way, but I can’t really define what “this way” is. I just know that things aren’t supposed to be this way, whatever way that is. I’m pretty sure this is old-man talk in my head, that things are too fast, too loud, too superficial, too busy, too everything-bad compared to this utopia I imagine existed at some point before, a before never recorded in history books or newspapers or the interwebs.

And it really wasn’t even the pickup truck, though it, too, was too fast, too loud, too everything-bad. It was that the pickup truck was yet another thing that seems out of place in the world I want to live.

Wifey Poo asked me the other day: “Do you ever think there will be enough stuff, enough places?” We were talking about the announcement that Starbucks is going to open up a new location in a neighboring town, a new location that, as we figured out, is 1.2 miles from one it doesn’t intend to close to make room. So within 1.2 miles, people will have two options to get overpriced, not-that-great coffee.

A different neighboring town has two Sherwin-Williams locations. Two. I wouldn’t think there needs to be two paint places in two states. But we’ve got two of them, separated by less than five miles. Why?

Wifey Poo has been talking like this for years. On a long-distance drive, she once asked if I ever thought we’d run out of space to build houses and apartments. She hasn’t been to Montana as recently as I have, so I assured her we’re still good.

But she has a point: When is enough enough? If two Starbucks within 1.2 miles of each other isn’t, if two paint stores in the same town isn’t, when will it be?

I understand the hypocrisy of lamenting the speed, sound, and connectedness of everything while screaming into the internet. It is not lost on me that the very, very, very small audience I have for this crap wouldn’t be there if not for the thing at the core of the everything-bad feeling I have. I live with that hypocrisy in the hopes I’m using it for good, but I think that might be akin to the truth that no one thinks they are the stupid driver, yet everyone agrees stupid drivers are as plentiful as MAGA hats at a monster truck rally.

And speaking of MAGA, I sometimes wonder if this feeling isn’t the whole point of that Orange Asshat’s movement, to sow chaos such that everything feels unsettled and we’re spending more time wondering why that is instead of, ya know, being upset about the Constitution being ritualistically burned by a bunch of billionaires. It’s like we who don’t subscribe to his racist, bigoted ideology are in permanent fight-of-flight mode, and that’s an exhausting way to live.

I know I feel exhausted. Do you?

I got on the highway behind the white pickup. For all his gotta-go bluster and exhaust fumes, a red light is a great equalizer. He got caught up behind a tractor trailer as we entered the highway. I moved to the left lane and passed them both.

Two minutes later, here comes the white pickup, roaring by, unencumbered by tractor trailers, stoplights, or anything else that would indicate he has a place in this world that he’s really pushing the boundaries on. I’m sure he’s a fine man, but pardon me for having at least a passing thought about his death in a fiery crash somewhere up ahead.

I don’t want to have those thoughts. But I have them nonetheless. Because I think that maybe things wouldn’t feel so goddamn off if we all just stepped a little bit lighter on our journeys through this world. I can be a Type A asshole when I need to be, but that doesn’t mean that’s my best part, or even a good part. It just seems like it’s sometimes a necessary part to avoid being trampled, and those who wield it like a butter knife instead the goddamn machete that it is are being irresponsible and ignoring the very real truth that they are wielding it carelessly around other human beings.

Which brings me back to Montana. I went there in 2019. I was in a really bad place at the time, and going solo on a writer’s retreat was probably not the best thing for me. Still, the place’s natural beauty was amazing. Most notably different, besides the fact that it was August and you could actually breathe the air instead of having to drink it like you do in Missourah summers, was home much space each individual has. No one is there crowding you and being loud and fast and obnoxious in your vicinity. And if they are, there’s a whole helluva lot of other vicinity to go vicin in. So I did that. I spend hours sitting out by this random stream I found and saw and heard no one. I drove across a mountain road into Idaho to this hot spring that no one was at nor visited during the entire two hours that I soaked in it.

I didn’t see one Starbucks, let alone two in 1.2 miles, which somehow became something of significance, a marker of a simpler way of being.

Part of me is screaming (quietly) for that simpler way of being, for disconnecting from anything and everything and just spending what time I have left, for however long I decide I want to stick around, in someplace … different from where I am now. Disconnected from the internet, TV, smart-this and smart-that.

Wifey Poo loves people. She’s not inclined to join me should I take this journey and call it permanent. I get that. People matter. Trust me. I feel that through the loneliness that has seeped into my bones like cancer. But the noise? The speed of everything? The general obnxiousness that is humans in close proximity to one another? That’s a cancer too. And if one of them is going to kill me, well, wouldn’t it be better to have the quieter form of death?

That’s just a thought I’ve been having.

Too Loud, Too Fast

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