short: oil at three

When you are a stranger in a foreign town everything is clean. No one knows your past glories and all your mistakes have been cleared. You hide your scars under sleeves long and give every passing stranger the youthful glance that optimism brings. But something isn't right. The strangers avoid your blue eyes; they seem to catch sight of the red spider webs spread across the white. Bloodshot eyes in a town of undisclosed secrets present an incalculable proposition, so you hope to pass like a ghost. But like a ghost, these souls see straight through you.

As you explore the strange city through the cracked windshield of a '74 Pontiac Firebird, it occurs to you that some, no, most of the scenery is not completely alien. Time has turned its tides over this terrain, but its skeleton remains the same. The sharp bend ahead recalls the tale you heard as a young child: Bobby J, on the night of his sixteenth birthday, entered the turn with too much speed and too much youth, piercing the guard rail and sending his father's Buick into the ravine; the thick foliage swallowed a vehicle and the life of a sixteen-year old boy. And up around the bend on the right, at the entrance of a new subdivision, once stood an abandoned house, which, every Halloween at midnight, was visited by three ghosts – the ghosts of three children who were killed by their mad mother one hot August night. So the story goes, anyway.

Yes, you know these pictures. These narratives are familiar. You grew up here. You knew these streets as a child; you heard the stories, you fought the battles of juvenescence and you danced through the sprinklers of blamelessness. You remember the school bus stop on the corner, next to the tree stump. And the first time you kissed a girl: it happened just beyond the border of Melanie's back yard, in the corn field, where stalks of corn reached for the sky and provided coverage from wandering eyes.

As you drive these displaced yet familiar streets you wonder what new memories are being constructed. The face in the rear-view mirror is twenty-nine years old; these streets no longer belong to you. They never did. The asphalt and blue skies were yours as corn stalks are to a September breeze. After dust has made itself from your bones the memory machine will continue to churn here, and a new generation will place itself inside the confines of this strange machine, and as the passing seasons ripen their bones for death, only then will they realize that they are not the creators; they are not the artist gracing his canvas with brush; and they are not the writer weaving tales from unsteady fingertips. No, they are merely witnesses; observers of a crime innocent in nature yet stunning in its vastness, leaving not a single soul vindicated – not every eye will be stained by this offense, but not a single eye will remain unchanged; these unborn children will replace the previous cast of onlookers and observe the wondrous workings of the machination. Indeed, despite history and all of its implications, every body entering the confines of this strange machine will charter his or her own path to death, notching glories on the breastplate of pride, hiding mistakes in the shadows of uncertainty.

We are all terminal. Temporary is the disposition of human existence.

But you've no time to ponder such things. You are only passing through. A stranger in a foreign land with a face aged beyond its twenty-nine years, you aren't looking for philosophical idiom, just an all-night hotel with free HBO. A suitcase of dirty clothes lay in the trunk. A destination unknown peels itself from the asphalt and clings to your tires. This '74 Pontiac is burning oil at 3AM, and the sun may never rise again.

xx