Driving home along the super-slab that is The 101, I drove along side an old VW Golf that was literally covered in stickers. You could no longer tell the manufactured paint color of this VW. It was a collage of social and political messages in an explosion of colors and bold prints and exclamation points, traveling at seventy miles per hour.
The driver, a young lady with a bob cut, was concentrating on the traffic in front of her until she saw me pacing and reading her car. Whether she thought I was judging her or actually reading her was beyond her stoic expression, which, come to think of it, was probably mostly an amused reaction that some idiot in a Lamborghini would actually take the time to read stickers that her friends probably slapped on the car over the years. But, from my point, I’m always happy to entertain myself while traveling The Mind-Numbing 101.
Of course, the whole thing takes me away from The 101 and back to the days when I was a young and rebellious punk who thought he knew how the world worked, always had something to say, and fired off his mouth at any chance that an ear might have been around. But I think that everyone falls victim to this delusion and sooner or later realizes that the world has a lot more to say back at you and that whatever you had to say gets drowned out by the noise of life. In the end, you don’t have much to say but you’re still traveling seventy miles an hour to a destination you’re not quit so sure about.
Whatever message you have now is not the same as then. And I wanted to holler this to the bob-cut girl in her VW, over the thrashing wind of The 101. But she took an exit to some other destination not too far from my own.
