The Economy

Ohhhhhh, no, no, no, no, no.
That's one of the worst stretches of drive. Most of it is rolling hills and two-lane. Dang flat land truckers who don't know any better get beside each other and jam I-40 up at 60 mph for miles and miles.

 

I drove across the entire fucking length of Tennessee more times than I care to count.

 

It was good for thinking, composing, and listening to Richard Marx on my little turquoise boombox.

Wow. Just...wow. In the interest of not prying I will not ask why. I did that once and was driven to throwing my boyfriend's Kentucky Headhunters cassettes out the window when he finally dozed off. I replaced them.

 

You got tired of being invited to go down to Dumas Walker’s?

 

I am intimately familiar with I-40 from Wilmington to Memphis. Many times I've been east of Raleigh, seen a car with Shelby County plates, and thought, "You poor son of a gun."

 

"From Memphis to Norfolk is a 36-hour drive ... "

 

Did I mention almost all the drives were solo? Simple enough explanation. My wife lived near Little Rock when we met and I lived in the Tri-Cities.

 

No shit? The majority of dad’s family still lives in Washington and Carter counties.

 

Oh, there are plenty of people here who go 80-90 whether there’s room for them or not.

And I won’t go off on Marylanders again, but they either go 90 and try to run you off the road, or they cut you off and drive 20 mph below the speed limit. They’re the absolute worst.

The way I see it, if you purposely drive 10 mph under the speed limit in front of me, I’m going to assume you’re an asshole. So, I will be an asshole in return and tailgate the shit out of you.

 

Memphis to Senatobia or Oxford/University are good writerly drives, too. There was a widow in Senatobia who made costumes for cats and chickens. She's probably long gone. I wonder if anyone else took up the mantle of pet couture.

 

I have to drive an hour to get to a four-lane highway. Driving 45 on a 55 is a common occurrence by older men, often farmers. Or older ladies going to church on Sundays, weaving wildly at the lines.I drive 40 miles to get to work each night and have an older gent in a red 1980s Ford pick-up who is driving 35 on the state highway each night of the summer that I go around. He’s looking at the fields he owns. I also sit behind combines, tractors for miles on certain roads.

We have a large Amish population that will take up a quarter of the road at times.

We all manage not to shoot each other. I mean, blowing away a family of Amish people may sound fun to all of you, not a sport for me. Maybe try some the really conservative religious cult and its compound we have 20 miles away. But they all surrender their cars to the cult and have a fake police car that pulls people over for speeding and gives fake tickets and have stockpiled AR-15s they brandish openly. So watch out.

I’m non-plussed by your rage. I escaped the rat race at age 28 after my second mental breakdown. I really root for everyone else to escape at some point, as well. Most will never collapse the ego enough to get there. Good luck.

If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred…