45s on 33 – #12: “Cool Aid”

Hustling to work this morning, got in front of a rough-looking old Silverado pick-up with pieces about to fall off rumbling the same direction as me. It got on my ass for a minute as I got up to speed, and I could see multiple body silhouettes squeezed into the cab, steered by grizzled looking don’t-give-a-fuck dude behind wheel. We all got hung up at a busy back roads intersection stop sign, and rear viewing them, I saw the dude, with full haggard goatee of a man carefully trying to bridge business and party worlds, with what I assumed (because we are always making assumptions) was his wife at the passenger window. Both had that bulbous pear shape of the American underclasser fed a steady diet of corn syrupy shit lacking nutritional sustenance, so you are always eating but never feeling fed, and often times forced by circumstance to go for the most cost-efficient food, which tends to skew towards unhealthy in the long-term. I mean, they’ve never fed Sprague-Dawley lab rats Burger King dollar menus over long periods to see how it turned out, nor do I think they ever will, because we can’t have the truth as it’s not as “affordable” and profit-friendly.

There were two other lumps stuffed between this pair in the Silverado’s cabin – a girl who looked to be early teens, sitting beside the man. The girl had that gaunt ever-so-slightly weasel-like face of people with hillbilly genetics, which blends so well into drug addiction and hardship later in life. That facial structure fills court dockets across America. And there was a boy too, probably about 8 or 9, slouched up against the woman next to the passenger window. The boy was sleeping, dead tired sleeping, as there was no stirring about at stop signs or when we all started up on our little rat race hamster wheel pursuits again eventually. They were all so ugly in conventional sense, in a progressive sense, but such a beautiful sight in my Friday morning rear view mirror – simple little family tucked into a shit model Silverado, rumbling off to their day’s affairs and responsibilities placed on each of them by the society we all share, just barely.

The road into the small city all of us work at, all of us from all the surrounding localities long ago flooded by hurricanes or decimated by abandoned factories, all the little towns that dried up almost completely except for maybe a single “country” store, or the little towns still holding on despite half a century trends – we all work in this little small city. The two-lane opened its promising legs up to four, with a median strip, and there was a cop on motorcycle with radar technology stalking there, knowing all of us rats racing into our responsibilities were all late because of the bottleneck structure of this maze, and the two opening up to four allowed for bursts of frustration to move vehicles faster towards nowhere, and he wanted to be there to skim a little more ticketed profit off for the state.

The family in the Silverado took the right lane and I took the left, and they roared past, pieces hanging off the truck, bed literally full of trash bags that looked to be recycled beer cans, no tailgate just a tie-down strapped across for looks mostly, flapping in the air. The man at the steering wheel was peeking into his side view mirror, back at the cop, same as me, all of us making sure we were okay for the moment. Cops don’t respect that family’s type of beauty; they don’t respect my beauty. They only see delinquency, very little beauty in this world.

The Silverado kept plowing straight ahead as I veered left onto an interstate highway system that connects a lot of these cities but very few of these people. We’re all the fucking same, all fighting the same shit stream, trying to maintain our obligations while still staying halfway happy. We’re all trying to keep the business and the party both attended to, but it gets more and more difficult every fucking month. In that difficulty, we look at each other and see how ugly other people are, bunch of rats, weasel-looking assholes, the enemy. But that’s not the truth. We’re all beautiful, all just moving along the only way we really have been taught how. We haven’t engineered each other’s misery, not at all.