I'm not much one for dwelling in the past (who am I kidding? I love doing that) but here's an old post that I find interesting still. In thinking about where I was when I wrote this (on my currently mostly ignored myspace site) all I can say was, wow, what simpler, hectic times. I do wish I could go back and tell myself "get your act together, man," but that would be a hurtful insult to a person who was trying so desparately to get his act together.

Spooky Ol' Highway 18 July 2007


Just some thoughts:...
Last evening my sister and i went a-strollin' through the merry ol' town of Butterfield, pop. 394, according to one sign, and 200 and some according to another, and as we walked home from the local fuelling concern/convenience store I began musing aloud about the seemingly inherent spookiness possessed by highways. If you miss what I'm saying, I mean take a walk down a fairly quiet highway at twilight and see if you don't start feeling it, kind of like...well, like I said to Jerika, it's similar to the creepiness of hotel rooms, a place where countless people before you have passed through. And you don't know anything about these people, what they think, what they've done, what they did earlier the day that they stayed...highways, or any kind of well-traversed trail or path carved by human beings, have a similar nature, i think. By the shear number of the people that use them they become stained or marked with the quotidianness of the commute, yadda, yadda, yadda. Thus imbuing said road with...not something as melodramatic as a consciousness or soul, but maybe with a mood...I mean how many of those countless,commuting, faceless people are bad? How many are crazy? How many are murderers, child molesters? How many are on their way at that moment with nefarious intent in their destination?
Jerika pointed out that roads are a daily feature in many peoples' lives, and that when people die, (some of them on the road itself), roads are just as likely as houses to become haunts for souls compelled to stay at places familiar to them in life...if you believe that type of thing...Is this the core idea behind the spookiness of roads? A road isn't a place, really, it's a transitional phase or system, a means to many ends, but not really an end itself. Something like Death, with a capital D? w/r/t that idea, get this; one of the more chilling scenes in Joe Hill's novel Heart-Shaped Box is when the protoganist Jude gets a midnight phone call from his assistant Danny, who says calling from a payphone on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere...he's suddenly realized the nature of his whereabouts and tells Jude that he killed himself a few hours ago and that this road in the dark, this is dead. The moment is very poignant, to me anyway, because it seems not only plausible, but true. Or valid, at least. Death as a road. It makes more sense than eternal paradise or eternal damnation merited by the mundane actions of one's life...
Well anyway, hope you enjoyed my ramblings, or at least understood them. Comment me if you have any ideas or anything you wanna add.