Click - my Mom and I were in sync this morning with our seatbelts; I rode with her to work again so that I can have the car to drive my little brother in the next hour to an Orthopedist for a double check on his femur. My Mom and I talked about the accident of course - these morning rides are becoming little mobile therapy sessions. She thinks that they will be called back to New Orleans next week and kept talking about jail. I told her that we can't treat anything as inevitable at this point, but my voice sounded whiny.
I drove home, tired since I've been getting up at 6:30 the past few days but haven't really changed my 1-2AM bedtime. I thought that I was just tired until I adjusted the rear view mirror (my Mom is five feet tall so the mirror points at a sliver of the back windshield before I remember to move it) - anyway, I adjust the mirror and there's this pickup truck, a big blue job that usually appears in commercials with dusty landscapes and leather and a hoarse manly announcer voice that wouldn't be caught dead giggling - and this driver, a weathered white guy with a buzz cut is on my ass. I slow down to 35 even though the speed limit is 40 - this guy in his tool truck doesn't pass me, he just drives closer. We do this for about a mile, and I've slowed down to 30 before taking an entrance ramp to the bypass, the straightest shot home. Halfway up the ramp, I hit the gas and don't look at the speedometer. There is a yield sign that I don't stop at - both lanes of the interstate have rushing traffic. I ride the shoulder and speed up until I find a sizable space to merge between two cars. The blue pickup truck is still stopped at the yield sign a quarter mile back - and that is how you drive aggressively, fuckhead - have a good one now.
A few miles down the road, I slow down and start using turn signals again. It occurs to me that the blue pickup driver may have just been driving distractedly, that he couldn't give two shits about who is the more aggressive driver. I'm not sure what else to say about that other than I'd rather drive like a granny and not be goaded into these pointless, possibly imaginary pissing contests.
Still, I want to compete, once I find out where to take that energy - something to keep in sober mind. I think I need to listen to my stomach on that one. I overthink - my Mom mentioned that, even as a young kid, I'd sit back a little and maybe draw while I watched kids play and consider if and how I'd join in.
But yeah, I need to "think" more with my stomach. Some people call it listening to your heart, but I hate that shit. If you listen to your heart, the all you're going to hear is lub-dub; it's a beautifully designed organ that circulates blood so leave it at that. But the stomach, that is your link to the outside world, the waiting room for when you've ingested your surroundings to see how they'll pass through you.
I believe that there are three main centers of thought in your body: head, groin, and stomach. I won't go into the other two at the moment, but there is now a soft spot above my stomach from where the surgeons cut through skin and muscle to get to my lymphnodes. I would liken it to the soft part of a newborn baby's skull that better allows her or him to exit from the womb. I don't know if this new softness will help me out of a tight spot, but it does bulge out like a second stomach when I lean way back (I've been told that this is probably a hernia).
After one week, I'm starting to see that this could be good news. Perhaps this will allow me to better listen to those gut feelings, since that's from where those multiple, daily incidences mentioned earlier originate. Perhaps today I will not let those trailing thoughts make it to my already overburdened head. Perhaps I'll just act and see where those take me. Perhaps this is the start of adventures to be remembered.
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