The Preacher in Me

Errands, The Great American Highway 85, 146, 14, 385, 29, 25, 123, S-39-30, and Uncharitable Thoughts

It’s been hot.  Beautifully hot most days: hot with clear blue skies.  And like my friend Charley once said, from the inside of an air-conditioned car, it looks like heaven on earth.  Yesterday, even from the inside of a cool car, it was not so heavenly.  It was hot and hazy.  That kind of overcast day in which the light is such that it washes out all color and the world looks like an old seventies photograph from which the especially fugitive dyes then used in the development process have faded away.  Things are not quite black and white, but they are not exactly colored either.  That’s what yesterday looked like.  On days like that, even blasting the air-conditioner does not cool one off.  It’s not a haptic thing, it’s a visual one.

I had to go see about a tooth at a dentist whose office is located just beyond Hell, on highway 14, which intersects and marks the end of what passes for urban development on Woodruff Road in Greenville.   When I first got here, Woodruff Road was a wonderful two-lane country road which I used enjoy driving on every time I needed to go get Plexiglas at a plastics factory down that way.  Ok, “wonderful country road” and “plastics” seem like an uncomfortable marriage, but it worked.  And hey, we are talking humans here, wonderful is a matter of degrees; and, heck, we need our plastics...

Suffice it to say that it was a nice under-developed country road to drive on at the end of a long day, with few businesses and no traffic until it got developed “cheap and dirty”.  Now it's just another little piece of hell on earth.

Places like Woodruff develop because of a severe lack of political and public foresight, bad zoning laws, and a lack of intelligent, yes, design.  The incentive structure in such places result in the continued development of your typical American Strip ‘o Crap with all the Crap-marts and crap-food joints that typically surround American cities and preclude any further intelligent urban growth once they become established.  The American Strip o’ Crap keeps being built even after studies show that they destroy any possibility of sustainable urban development.  And if fuel conservation is truly a goal of that asshole administration in power at the moment, working to change how land is developed should be one of its priorities.  Of course that would send a certain segment of the business community, the creator of crap development segment, into a tizzy; and god knows what the Tea Partiers might do then, maybe create a country just to succeed... Oh, but I digress...

...So while I was stopped at one of the hundreds of traffic lights in that horrible faded landscape, I noticed a strip mall called “Woodruff Commons” .  Common indeed: it had a tanning salon, a fast cash outlet, a consignment clothing store, and some eatery serving the usual American fair: food without taste, without nutritional value, full of fat, full of salt, and assembled on the premises while produced in some food factory in another part of the country. It was 100 degrees and I wondered who could possibly want to go lay in a tanning coffin... 

In the washed out light that the day had served up, looking at the place made me want to kill myself.  Or more specifically, what is usually my MO, I wanted to kill all petty politicians who allow places like Woodruff to virally infect the land...  But heck, it’s not the politicians, it’s the people.  The landowners make money, the developers make money, and the people must like the traffic, the lack of vegetation, the scalding black top parking lots, and the shit that passes for food in all the franchises that line the road. 

And as I drove past all those franchised food joints, I once again thought about the much discussed, though in truth ignored, obesity problem in America.  Being in an uncharitable mood, what I thought was uncharitable. America, you are fat because you sit in the car all day and you eat shit for food.  There is no magic bullet for what ails you. No operation.  No easy drug. No all-you-can-eat calorie free buffet. You need to get off yo’ ass and find some fresh food.  Make your own meals.  Use your hands again.  Get in touch with your body and soul.  

And then Hell disappeared as I drove down a ramp onto 385...

To get to Woodruff, I had taken one of “The Great American Highways”, US HWY 85.  Driving on that highway, a main conduit for eighteen wheelers crossing America from east to west and north to south and chockfull of SUV’s on steroids, in my beloved normally-sized 20 year old Subaru is always exciting.  If I thought of the reality of it, I would never get into my little death trap of a car and, as they say, “take to the open road”, which, though fast and furious, is anything but open.  I don’t think too much about it, I just take it on faith that the odds of survival are in my favor, crank up the music to drown out the noise, and drive onto what, to me, is always a reminder of the mess we find ourselves vis à vis energy consumption.  Yep, not an iota of optimism here either (oh yeah, don’t forget to boycott BP).

After running all my boring little Greenville errands, I took a different way home and got onto SC 123, a state highway as opposed to a federal one.  As such, it is smaller in scale and has more of a human feel to it; but it is no less wasteful a way to get from point A to point B than is 85.  And after driving through its urban parts, one more American Strip o’ Crap this time in Easley, I settled down to my cruising speed of 70 miles per hour, 5 over the speed limit, to do the 17 miles it takes to get home from that point on.  At that point, it’s a nice ride home, one in which the highway is flanked by trees, usually green in summer, colored in fall, dead in winter, though yesterday, because of the light, seemingly gray. 

When driving, I rather ride alone.  I will speed up or slow down in order to have as few cars around me as possible.  Most of the time I succeed.  But there is frequently that stupid asshole that hangs about and makes me think that maybe my car is creating a force field that is sucking vehicles into its vortex, for no matter what speed I do, said asshole will either be on my ass, passing me slowly on either side, or getting in front of me and then slowing down to the point where I have to pass him or her and start the aggressive dance all over the fuck again. 

Yesterday such asshole was driving a nice new white pick-up truck.  And no matter what speed I did, the asshole seemed to hover aggressively in front, in back, or on either side of my car.   We danced that way for a while until he passed me (again) and I took the opportunity to look good and hard at his vehicle.  I had been “dealing” with it but not “seeing” it.  What I saw was a nice white truck full of brand new tires haphazardly heaped on the bed of the truck and haphazardly placed standing up on and poised to roll off a high rack near the cab; none of these tires were tied down.   I knew they were new because of the nice yellow band around them that signifies their unworn status.

In seemingly slow motion, it occurred to me that physical forces were acting on these tires that would, at any moment, turn them into projectiles that would fly off that rack and hit whatever object was behind the pick-up truck; and at that precise moment, said object was my car.  I applied the brakes and got as far from said asshole as fast as possible.  And wouldn’t you know it, as soon as I thought about the possibility of one of those tires flying off that rack, one did just that.  It flew off, hit the road, and careened onto the median only to disappear in the grass.  I don’t know where asshole was going, but there were still a lot of tires left to fly off that truck... 

The driver did see the tire fly off because he slowed down to half the speed he was doing and got into the right lane... I kept expecting him to stop and go get the tire, but he never did.  I've seen people stop to pick up all kinds of things that have fallen off their trucks.  I've seen them even stop to pick up fugitive hub caps; but this guy never even thought of stopping to pick up a brand new tire that had flown off the truck he was driving.  He obviously worked for a tire sales outfit and was perhaps transporting tires from one store to another.  I would bet he was not the owner of the tire store because an owner would have stopped to pick up his merchandise, and perhaps even tie the tires to the rack in the first place.  What this guy seemed to be was some employee lucky enough to have a job in this economy, and yet not giving a damn about how he did his job. 

At this point in the day, being way past  “uncharitable”, I again thought of our contemporary state of affairs.  I thought once more about how people are no longer in touch with their bodies and souls. And about how a lot of people don't care about what they do or how they do it.  And I thought about how maybe you are what you do, and if you don’t care about what you do, you must not care about what you are... And I thought about what kind of world that results in...  I also thought about how I should never get in the car on a hot hazy day, and that I should only drive to Woodruff Road on beautiful clear blue skied ones....

I took Isaqueena Trail off of 123; still a state road but a small winding two laned one on which one more developer saw it fit to build one more big box store: a Lowe’s.  Acting on the "if you can’t fight them, join them" principle, I stopped in to get some paint rollers before going home.  I parked and did not notice what I had parked next to.  I went into the store, got back into the car, started the ignition and then noticed... And just like Lou Reed says in Harry's Circumcision, "Katya" had to laugh.  I did not have my camera; but I had my electronic Swiss army knife of a phone and clicked a picture.  I don't know what this means on so many levels.  I'm not even sure the sentence structure makes any sense... It sometimes can be that way with us preachers... I drove home as the day cleared.