Traffic is No Place for Philosophy
It was the bug on the windshield that got me thinking about it. Not mortality, no, I'd been through that one twice before breakfast.
It was that sort of day. And then I wound up missing breakfast, anyway.
The bug had been hanging on for the last ten miles at 50 miles an hour or more and was now sitting there, like a stain, collecting its breath. Or so I imagined. I imagined it clinging on to the windshield which was pockmarked in the right places by the grit laid down in the winter and kicked up by cars in the spring when the snow all melted. It was taking a quick survey, as it had no idea when the next time it would have to rest again would be, nor how long this current rest would last. It was all so... indeterminate.
And then I got to thinking it might actually be a stain, and not a bug, after all. One of those mysterious stains, a yellow splotch that must have come from a tree or something, but I couldn't recall ever having parked under a tree that might let yellow berries or leaves fall.
At any rate, the bug or stain got me thinking, and when I looked up at the traffic lights I could only see the little individual lights that made up the red light and arrow at which I was stopped. Like a Lite-Brite™. I could picture someone, some small child, more likely than not a girl with design sensibilities, plocking the individual bulbs into place on a black sheet of construction paper, all in a circle, a pixelated circle, and then in an arrow pattern as a sort of reward. Not that I'm accusing the highway works department of using sweatshop child labor to do their dirty work. It's just what I pictured.
Even in broad daylight they were little beacons of sharp green light, which reminded me (as well as the Lite-Brite™ example) of a glow-in-the-dark clock my parents had when I was a kid, and how I'd stand in the room for hours with the lights off, watching the clock. All right, maybe it wasn't hours. Maybe in total, all told, it added up to hours I spent in front of it, but that's probably also stretching it. It fascinated me, the way glow-in-the-dark does kids.
And when I noticed the constant blare of beeping behind me I realized I had been looking at a green light.
Go.
disclaimer:
I don't know how we did it, but we got another issue out this week. William Murphy pitched in with a little help. Thanks, Billy boy.
Will this keep up as the janitor's new son grows and grows to consume all life around him? Who knows? Not me, that's who, at any rate. So you just keep showing up, we'll try and keep having stuff worth showing up for. Or at the very least have stuff you've been showing up for all along.
We'll see.
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