White Noise.

The steady whine of the engine slows to a rumble, when I stop four cars back from an orange-vested highwayman. He looks on, bored, leaning against his sign, revealing the secrets of life Stop & Slow. But my body doesn't want to conform. It refuses to decelerate. My atoms speed around inside like lab mice on cocaine. I fidget, yank the parking brake into place, and bounce my knee anxiously, before turning the volume up and the squelch down a notch on the CB radio.

Turning the squelch down opens the floodgates to static and distant truckers' voices. In their eagerness to stay awake or break the tedium, the truckers all overlap, trying to sing their favorite Country song, talk shit to antagonizing teenagers out of school for summer break, or tell stories of woe from their eighteen-wheel purgatories. The result is insanity.

It must be what it's like to be God. Alone, with a neverending cacophony of lonely souls lobbing prayers up at you like grenades, until it becomes a persistent itch that won't die. Like Kurt Cobain and his last morning alive. Hiding from the world, overlooking the cold blue of Lake Washington from an upstairs window, reaching down for the squelch dial shaped like a trigger, until the voices and everything disappeared to white noise.

But I m not God or Kurt Cobain.

I pick up the CB mic, watching the highwayman smack his gum like a stupid cow chewing its cud, and push the button. I begin to tell my life story, using a false name and feigned voice to forget that I am alone.
 

Ron Gibson, Jr.
Kent, WA, USA