It was just past twilight… getting dark… cruising south on the 101, heading towards San Francisco from up north. As I crested a hill, I looked to the horizon; four lanes, gently packed solid, of reddish orange tinted taillights, going my way, stretching for as far as the eye could see. And four lanes, gently packed solid, of white headlights, coming my way, for as far as I could see… a nonstop flowing river of machinery… on a January evening of 70 degrees. Perfect summer weather in mid winter. If this is global warming, well it felt pretty good, right at that particular moment.. Yes, I was feeling really pretty good, having ridden a half tab of acid since noon. I had a cold beer going. I was keeping it down low and out of sight, sipping in perfect syncopation with the passing traffic, doing two miles under the speed limit,a perfectly innocuous cruising entity… that wouldn’t draw the attention of the heat… and the heat wasn’t showing much anyway.
And I felt so good, so alive, so crisp with awareness.
And yet, too, I felt so bad for the planet, as I, along with half of the rest of the inhabitants of the planet, burned my portion of fossil blood. Pressed the pedal down, flowed the fuel to the carburetor, and let her burn. It burned me down the freeway and burned up the atmosphere. I was cruising through space at sixty three MPH, going from here to there in a hurry, comfortable and feeling good. Only, there was just this slight nagging discomfort over the burning up the planet part.
If someone, walking the Oregon trail a hundred and fifty years ago, could have had a mad prophetic dream of the future, I would have been that dream. If that pedestrian, walking along beside his prairie schooner, could have seen me in the future, and seen the non-stop river of taillights and headlights, stretching to the horizon, if he could have seen the future, in a forward revelatory flash, he would have dropped to his knees in confusion and terror, completely unable to comprehend what he saw with his own eyes. He would have seen people using strange animals called automobiles… using them like heroin, burning up the planet… like no tomorrow. A billion automobiles, burning fuel simultaneously, with fifty thousand airliner, and fifty thousand freighters on the ocean. Simultaneously burning fuel like it was going out of style, which of course it was. And no one paying the slightest attention, because, God Damn, it felt GOOD to be cruising down the freeway.
I, myself, had some tunes on. There was a lovely, slightly surreal, neon glow to the vapor charged sunset. I mentioned to my girlfriend, who’s breast I was fondling, that to be part of this madness, to be part of this sea of machinery burning up the planet, in real time, was a little like, as if, you were enjoying some weird high associated with bleeding your own veins; some strange pre-death experience that was merciful in the kind way that nature is merciful with death, when the endorphins kick in, and someone passes beyond suffering. I mentioned to my girl friend that this moment was like that. We were bleeding our veins, and the veins of the planet, driving down the freeway, having a good time. Its a rare moment to sometime, in a flash, see the common, ordinary, daily event, as being actually absolutely unbelievable, and extraordinary; bizarre and astonishingly weird… something like burning up the planet to have a good time. She softly told me to, “Shut up.”. She didn’t want to hear some downer. I laughed because, I wasn’t on a downer… far from it. I was flying, feeling GOOD. Flying down the 101, tunes playing, hands on tits. Life was GOOD, but still, so strange to be burning up the life of the planet, and all.
So I said to her, “Baby, I don’t care. I’m feeling good. But, still, to not admit that we’re bleeding our veins, bleeding the life of the planet, at that this very moment, for all that we’re worth… to admit anything less is pure denial or blindness… one or the other.” “Shut up.”, was her softly repeated advice.
I took her advice and felt the warm softness of her tit in my hands. Life was very good. Come what may.