SONG OF THE DAY: Juice

The melancholy grey of global warmed false spring morning at the truck stop near the interstate diamond exchange, most any rural area America. I’m leaning against my car as the gas pumps automatically, waiting for the pump lock to kick off, watching the crows congregate near the surveillance cameras on top of the other gas station with the McDonald’s attached. The crows are talking their shit, scavenging for cheeseburger wrappers with anything left, and the cameras are just keeping an ever-present eye on everything. The truck stop gas pumps blare pop radio country music, but there’s little dirt inside the sounds. We are living off the watered down juices of free spirited visions right now, everything from concentrate, genetically modified organisms pretending to be freebirds. The empire never trickled all the way down to everybody, but all these empty cheeseburger wrappers have left us plump with the belief we have it all, but there’s no real juice to none of this. It’s all fuckin’ tap water, full of shit and beta blockers, and we passively engage with oxygen intake while moving through the established routines of our day. I’m watching one crow in particular, a bold swaggering rook skip-stepping through the parking lot across the way, and he flaps off to a grass-ish median with what looks like a chunk of a McChicken sandwich, and my gas pump clicks off because it’s full. I squeeze it tight one more time, forcing a little bit more of that watered down nutritionless freedom juice into my car’s gullet, and then drive off into oblivion again. It is Monday, and we’re all fucked, but we keep pretending it’s going to be okay, because we don’t know what else to do. The surveillance cameras know far less than the crows do, but we’ve somehow convinced ourselves of the exact opposite.