Beyond the Horizon
Part 1
One of the lessons you learn after years of driving is that at some point or another, you’re going to experience the pain of repetition and predictability. Even when I first started off on the journey, I never had a destination in mind. It’s like as soon as I sat down and closed the door, it was getting hazy. It’s apparent to me now that from the moment I turned that old key and fired her up I was totally unsure of to exactly where I thought I was going. Driving is one of my greatest pleasures. There’s a sincere innocence in the act of driving. I lost sight of much of that, and from time to time I wasn’t sure if I was even in control. From a certain perspective the relationship between the machine and it’s controller breaks down, and it can become objectively difficult to distinguish which is driven by which.
To be fair, the warning signs were all over the place. It felt like I couldn’t go more than ten seconds without some sign, a precaution, a rule, a rule of thumb, a word of advice whispered in confidence. I always did my best to be a responsible driver. For the longest time I did my best to obey all the rules of the road, back before I knew better, or perhaps until I thought I knew better. Experience is the greatest teacher, not to mention the harshest. It’s common knowledge that to learn from experience makes even the worst decisions worthwhile. Sometimes it’s simply the only thing that one can take away from the curveballs so often thrown one’s way. The problem for the unwise lies in working out what lesson the accused is to take away from his crime. For the introspective the problem is rarely not seeing the problem at hand. They can even take precautions to make sure that one accident is never repeated, by not repeating whatever lead to disaster the first time around. For the experienced, and by that I mean the scarred, the disfigured, those drivers who possibly still hurt every waking day of their lives, there are an entirely different set of problems, regardless of their ability to learn from past experiences. The problem faced by the salty, by the ones who well and truly drove around that block more than they care to admit, is the inability to disengage from what they think they know best, and in doing so they find themselves sat exactly where they were before they even released the handbrake. One cannot escape his past, cannot escape the stupid things they did. But to make matters worse, they begin to see that so many of the reflective, glaring, fluorescent signs they are bombarded with as they hit the highway begin to contradict each other. They blur, they all look the same, sound the same. It seems impossible to follow one highway code without breaking another. At first, one particularly thoughtful individual might find, there seemed to be one over-arching Way. The irrefutable Tao of the road. The one true way. I miss that idea. I’ve reached a point where no matter how hard I try and see things as I used to, either I changed, or the rules did.
And so those rare unfortunates may find the signs begin to undermine each other. Slow down, but speed up. Be cautious, but never so more than you’re being brazen. Make sure to flaunt every last thing you have and haven’t ever done, because nobody likes It when you brag. And so experience fails you. It begins to lie to you, and even when you’re aware that there is clearly deception afoot, you become a man looking at a map with no reference as to where in the fuck they actually are. It’s at this point in my career as a driver that I also realised that for all the years I had been driving, I could not remember where I was going. I knew that I had been driving for a very long time, and I think at certain points I had stopped off at places, and I still remember the people I picked up. Some of them drove with me for the longest time. I always liked having passengers, but sooner or later, the destination is reached, and the journey has come to an end. But I digress. At a certain point, I found myself lost. It was the worst kind of lost, in that not only did I not know at all where and when I was, but in that I had totally forgotten where I had originally intended to go. I could not even remember at what point I had forgotten everything about myself. All I knew was in looking in the mirror, I was sure I didn’t recognise myself. I could not even describe the person who stared back at me. The Driver was a man about which you could say so much, but I’m quite certain that none of the obvious things you could gleam from that countenance were objectively correct. Nothing I’ve ever experienced has been quite so simple as that. First impressions are hard to resist, however. In a way it didn’t matter that I’m sure in some ways I recognised the Driver’s face, because from the moment I met his eyes with mine, I knew he’d always be a simple mystery to me, destined to be my enemy, the one who knew me the best.
He had the look of the man who has learned from experience as he lit that cigarette. The glow from the lighter revealed a face older and more weathered than I’m sure my own face was. He looked bad. I was certain he didn’t have the slightest good intention in mind for me, and yet everything in his eyes and in the tone of his voice struck me as sincere and well meaning. He spoke to me as if he knew me. We’re on the road now aren’t we? I’ve always loved these warm nights, the heady smell in the air. He grinned, and his eyes lit up. I suddenly felt thirsty. Thirstier than I’ve ever felt in my life. There was adrenaline coursing through my body now, and most of my worry had suddenly receded. As he rolled down the window, an old and child-like excitement crossed his face, as a child who is told on Christmas day that the best present has been saved to last. What does it even matter where we’re going? The pleasure’s in the driving. It’s also in the uncertainty. We passed a strange scene by the side of that long road. This struck me because until now it had all been so blank. There was a cow being led down the road by two men, one in front, and one following up from behind. We passed so quickly that the image struck me as an old black and white picture would have, fixed in my mind without the suggestion of fading. It was like some grim scene from a foreign abattoir, and I felt my spirit drop, knowing where the cow’s destination lay despite all his ignorance. He looked complacent if not slightly confused as to his predicament, being lead by his handlers as he was. For some unknown reason, I honestly felt very sad for him. Then I laughed. Fucker should have evolved faster. I couldn’t but help show the slightest disapproval, even if deep down something in me knew it was true. It would be pretty much the same if the boot was on the other foot. Or hoof. You get my drift. I laughed again, and I wasn’t sure if it was humour or desperation I heard in that laugh. It sounded strange to me, but laughs always sound strange when you really listen to them. Everyone knows what a laugh means, but that shit can’t be found in any dictionary I ever heard of.