Afraid of traffic

Labor Day: a reason to not work I am driving home on labor day, a silly day, maybe dedicated to all the eight year olds that made the iron pins that hold this building up. But thanks to them, I spent another day in South Carolina. And now my car is pointed northbound eye 95. The tape deck isn't working, never worked. I bought a little mechanism at Radio Shack not too long ago that I could hook up to my portable CD player that would project a signal to my car radio, so that I wouldn't have to surf. The Discman was stolen in Pitts., so I'm back to square one. I have taken caffeine pills salted with caffeine powder downed with my coke, taken to make the coffee go down a little easier, and I'm drifting…. The entire three northbound lanes are packed, cartocartocar, and we're all dreaming along at about 88 MPH. And suddenly Caffeine starts knocking on the terror section of my brain. We could all die in about 8 seconds, I bet 90 miles of us, all having one thing in common, and many more at a look, could die. Mostly white suburbians, traveling from a vacation of another suburbia with a very large body of water to the right of them.. or left facing the Cubans. Or what's worse, just I, could live. I could end the chain reaction and be legally responsible for eight states of death due to freeway ("s, cars, and trucks"). And I think, "Terry wouldn't it be funny of all these month's of avoiding cops, keeping the out of state fake plates, and living uninsured, if this is your day in the lime-light?" So I give the Nissan or Ford ahead of me about seven miles of break room. It's an 88 I'm sure anti-lock breaks were a millenium concept back when my Honda was a baby. Back when I was 10. I'm trying my hardest to get into country music, I'm trying my hardest to ignore the grim reaper smoking Camel Filters in the Toyota extend cab behind me, inside my back seat, chewing on the corduroy interior… I'm trying my hardest to force the Coca-Cola, but then Garth Brooks comes on. He doesn't remind me of Aly, Bethany, Marnie.. or any other girl of my recent past who has ever listened to Garth. He is there to tell me that if I die my personal procession music is going to be "Thunder Rolls". I am driving my nails past the rubber in the wheel, past the aluminum skeleton of my steering wheel, and I'm sure blood is painting my lap. The, "Welcome to North Carolina", sign is not neighborly, it is green hell. Fear rolled in like storms, and the green reflecting rectangle must be blowing thunder like aluminum likes to in wind and it "Rolls". My trendy late-nineties bleached hair is falling out into a perfectly "V"-shaped receding hairline, mile by mile. I feel like a first grader that knows that after midnight the clothes-rack is worse than the biblical Satan. I feel as if I deserve this. My artistic irresponsibility has grown a god. Maybe a God. Who is teaching humility, teaching the prodigal bastard to stick his shiny tail between his pretty cheeks. The freeways an indoor coliseum, and I have never been a monster truck.. but as I pull into the home parking lot.. I reach back into the trunk for the crowbar, gotta get these clothes off my back somehow.