Rhetorical Analysis: Gulf Coast

        Gulf Coast began in 1982 as a student-run publication out of the allegedly illustrious University of Houston, initially run by renowned creative nonfiction writer Philip Lopate, famously of that piece that he talks about his penis that nobody can seem to get over. Gulf Coast has multiple editors for poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and with each editorial position limited to a term of two years, one personality or predilection cannot dominate the process of selecting works for publication. According to their own statement, the editors of Gulf Coast seek "to promote and publish quality literature in [their] local and national communities while simultaneously teaching excellence in literary publishing to graduate and undergraduate students." Unfortunately this doesn't offer much in the way of suggestions for submissions.

        Gulf Coast currently charges a $2 reading fee, which they say goes towards the $50 per page honorariums of the writers they choose to publish. Submissions are from September 1st through March 1st, and must be previously unpublished and sent through the appropriate channels only. For creative nonfiction, pieces must be no longer than 7000 words, and simultaneous submissions are allowed.

        The website for the journal currently hosts a blog, but all of its posts appear to be written by current or former editors. Although the journal does publish some of the types of creative nonfiction we've been working on in class, it also publishes other types of nonfiction, and the majority of the pieces that is publishes are purely fiction. The creative nonfiction pieces it does publish are mostly short, about a page or two, but some are quite a bit longer. The pieces that were available online dealt with fairly traditional subjects, mostly familial relationships and life experiences, without any obvious political or ethical slant. There does not appear to be anything particularly fringe or progressive about the creative nonfiction published in Gulf Coast. Much of the work is very reflective narrative, and doesn't appear to push any agenda whatsoever. Nor do the pieces push the boundary of the literary. Their arrangement is standard, and only the most basic segmenting can be seen to break up individual works. In general this does not appear to be a journal to publish experimental creative nonfiction. 

        Overall, due to the length of time that this journal has been publishing the the prestigious name of its cofounder, Gulf Coast is a journal that is likely to publish established writers. As it says, it aims to publish writers from its southeast Texas community, and writers from its broader international audience, but is not more specific than that. It is not political or idealogical, and the fact that it has a reading fee and pays a sizable amount per page also suggest its seriousness. It seems like one would have to do universally acknowledged good work to get published here.

http://gulfcoastmag.org/

Expansion on Notes

The Golgi Apparatus

Is a part the animal cell which I remembered from Biology in high school. I thought it would make a great band name. Like a jazz band or something.

One day the man sat on his porch and prayed for his sanity

At the time I was working on a series really short stories, like 2 pages each, pretty closely based on events of my life. That night, I was having one of the most intense panic attacks I've ever had. Top five for sure, with a bullet. So I went outside and sat on the front step, and tried to breathe, and tried to control my racing thoughts, my overwhelming fears. I was terrified. I was scared I was going to lose the only edge I felt I've ever had- my ability to think. I'm not a religious man, but all illusion of pride or intellect was gone from me, and so I prayed. I begged God to let me keep my wits, to let me stay me. To not let me lose it completely. As it ended up, looks like we met somewhere in the middle. Or maybe God plays a long game. I don't remember when, whether I settled down and went back upstairs, or I took out my phone and typed in the words right then, because I knew I wanted to remember them. Whichever it was, I knew this would make for a good episode for my work, and I didn't want to lose it.

Sex with friends' girlfriends, for practice.

I was thinking about a character for a novel, or like a buddy comedy TV show. He's not a bad person on purpose, he's just really thoughtless. Things that upset other people aren't a big deal to him. The idea that crystalized this for me was the only one I wrote down about the whole project, which is his revelation, to the shock and indignation of his buddies, that he occasionally had sex with their girlfriends, so as to not be out of practice in case he met somebody and they really hit it off.

Meaningful and Expressive Error

I was driving somewhere, home probably, and it was night time, and I was listening to the radio, something on NPR. I don't remember it all the way, but basically what was happening was somebody did a study, where they took classical music and they had a humans play the music, and then they had a computer follow the sheet music of a classical composer exactly, and they found that people liked the human-played music better. And the thing the researchers took away from that was that we as humans find beauty and catharsis in the slight departures from perfection. The notes that were played almost imperceptibly longer or sharper than the exact notes on the page, the only discernible differences between robot and human, were the ones that caused a piece to resonate with a human listener, to stir an emotional response. Hearing this idea expressed on the radio was kind of like an epiphany. It put words to something that I feel like I had been trying to express for a decade or longer.  I needed to remember what I heard, so I could talk about it later.

Blog 12

This has been a real, real shitty week. Just a litany of misery and bullshit. So that's what I'm drawing from. If things go how they've been going, I think my work is going to take on a really raw personal quality. As much as I try not to hide to much of myself, I think this stuff is just much more intimate than I'm used to, and I'll be writing about it much more emotionally and less intellectually. Maybe that's what art is, why I've been getting it not quite right all along. Or maybe its just angsty drivel. Que sera, etc. So anyway, preamble aside, what I'm thinking about writing for the next round is something that honestly I don't think will fit that well into the format, but I'm going to try it.

When I was really young, I couldn't tell my dad's sisters apart. There were four of them, and they all looked and sounded alike. They would always ask me, and I could never remember. Now, my grandfather is confined to his bed, and most times of most days, he can't remember who they are either. They come in and out and joke with him, ask him questions in loud voices, ask if he knows them. I saw him on Sunday for the first time in a while. I wasn't going to see him because I was afraid to. And I went to see him, and it was what I was afraid of. It was worse than that.

So here I am, cheerful, sunshiny Matt Jacobi, and I'm going to write to you, reader, a short piece in which I parallel my experience of being a child surrounded by this large and cacophonous yet loving family, with watching my grandfather, the patriarch of that family, slip away from us. I'm going to jump back and forth in time a little bit. I'll maybe include the scene, just so nobody has any questions about this being a happy story, in which we all stood around my grandmother's hospital bed as she took her last breaths. I would do this not to be heavy-handed, but to talk again about all that loving shouting that is always happening.

"Hey Matt, who am I? Aunt who?"

"It's ok Mom, if you need to go, its ok. We're going to take care of Daddy, and we're all going to stay together, always. You gave us that Mom. This is your family. We love you, heart and soul."

"Dad? Do you know who this is? This is Matt. Petey's Matt."

So maybe the whole thing is kind of about grandma anyway. I don't know. It's going to be too long for a short piece anyway, so maybe i'll do something else. We'll see what happens.

Signaling (Blog 10, Long Final)

I was always scared, even when I was invited, of going inside, away from the birthday party or Fourth of July barbecue in the yard, walking upstairs, and knocking on the door to my cousin Mike’s bedroom so that I could hang out with him and his friends. I always looked up to Mike, probably still do, although I said I didn’t. Our age difference- I was four years younger- was significant when I was nine and he and his friends had recently become teenagers.  One of them in particular, perhaps the best of them, who had now grown into a competent and responsible adult and genuinely a great guy, had begun to grow an objectively terrible mustache. Like a sickly, shedding black caterpillar. But the gap in years wasn’t really what kept me away. As a fairly precocious child, I had no reservations about calling attention to myself or engaging my elders in debate. But I was always shy about trying to hang out with Mike and his friends. I never wanted to just come out and say, “Hey guys, is it cool if I hang out with you?” I was afraid, ashamed to say, “I want to be here. I want you to like me.” I couldn’t say it. So I wouldn’t. Every once in a while I would just walk in, like I belonged. Most of the time I stayed outside, eating charred cheeseburgers and talking to the grownups about school until it was time to go home.

In the car on the way home from Stewart’s, Mike and I chat idly. I mention my surprise at the fact that both of the women who made up 100% of the visible staff of that establishment I found attractive. In my mind, roadside hotdog chains were typically associated with overweight and/or bedraggled looking white people, so it only added to my surprise that one of these girls was not only pretty, but also black. Mike agrees with my assessment, but says that I’m wrong about Stewart’s; he says that he and his wife will pick up shakes and fried from there periodically and that it is usually staffed by pretty girls. This contradicts my understanding of tiny restaurants beside busy roads that only serve half a handful of different fast food items. This was the domain of ill-tempered men with overabundant arm hair, not the polite young women with bright eyes and clear skin. But I shrug in acceptance. Mike has made this run many more times than I have. I am new. This will be my first orange milkshake thing that Mike’s wife Kari insists is amazing. I defer to Mike’s judgment.

Once when I was a child, probably about eight, which would make Mike twelve, he came by my house to play, as he sometimes did. These were great times. Although Mike had better and newer video games than I did, and cooler toys, it was still great to have Mike at my house. It was fun to play with my toys, which were wasted on my younger brother and sister, with somebody else who appreciated them. The X-Men, Ghostbusters, Power Rangers- Mike got what these were about. It was maybe more fun to play with him than it was to play by myself. Playing with Mike, I didn’t know everything that was going to happen like I did when I was alone, but we both played by the same rules, so we rarely disagreed on the story as it was unfolding. One of these times, we weren’t playing, not at the moment. Maybe Mike had gone to the bathroom or answered the phone, but he was somewhere else for a little while. I was sitting in a big reclined in the middle of the living room. It was a bizarre piece of furniture, but maybe for the mid 90s it was cool, I can’t say. It was an overstuffed reclining armchair, upholstered all in baby blue corduroy. It was a fat, fuzzy corduroy too, nothing like the serious narrow material of the pants I own now. So I was sitting in this chair, and I don’t remember what I was doing, but I know Mike does. Because he remembers seeing me there, with the back of the chair turn to the room. And I remember just minding my own business, reading or something, and then screaming in terror and bursting into tears, fleeing for my life and my mother. I was a jumpy kid. I once woke up screaming because my new alarm clock frightened me out of sleep. My parents were not pleased. But I don’t have an honest memory of what I actually happened to scare me out of my skin like that. If you ask Mike, it was him walking up from behind me and saying “Hey Matt.” He was confused and alarmed by my reaction. He felt guilty about it for at least fifteen years. He might still.

Graduate school is hard for me. I’ve just started working on my Master’s in English and Writing Studies, and I don’t really even know what that means. I’m coming off of a really difficult summer, maybe the worst summer of my life. I was broke and bored and unhappy, and somehow also cripplingly, alarmingly anxious. I couldn’t sleep, my body hurt, I felt like I wasn’t myself. Despite finally achieving my Bachelor’s degree after nine years in an out of school, I did not enjoy my summer vacation. Mike is a speech-language pathologist, so although he works in schools, he doesn’t get much of a summer vacation. He’s a hard worker, and not much for partying, but to unwind at the end of the week, Mike invites me over to eat pizza and play videogames and hang out with his infant daughter almost every Friday. We call it Pizza Friday. These pizza Fridays had a fortifying effect on me throughout the summer. Watching my little cousin-niece (we haven’t decided if I’m cousin yet or uncle, so for now I am both- Cuncle Matt) learn walk and look for her first words was unexpectedly therapeutic. It’s hard to freak out about the way your heart is beating when you’re watching the Muppets with a baby on your lap.

That’s where the conversation has drifted to in the car. Mike, who has a rocky relationship with his brother, expresses to me how much he enjoys Pizza Fridays, and how cool he thinks it is that a younger guy like myself, still in my twenties, would want to hang out in his apartment with his wife and daughter and watch cartoons until the baby’s bedtime, and then play a Super Nintendo game or two before everyone is too tired to do much else but go home and go to bed. Conversely, I tell Mike how much I enjoy spending time with his family, how comforting it can be, and how much I appreciate his always insisting on buying dinner. Mike, even with his bills, makes many, many times as much money as I do. He says he is paying forward the kindnesses done him by others, our buddy/mentor uncle specifically, and suggests that when I am in a position to do so that I too will give somebody a break who deserves it. And in addition to that we’re great friends, and he knows how broke I am, and he can absolutely afford to pay for my share of a pizza every week or so, and that I shouldn’t worry about it. And I say thank you, so much, I so deeply appreciate it, but also that I struggle with not worrying about it, because I don’t want to be a freeloader and take advantage, and of course if roles were reversed I would do the same thing for him and have, but still it weighs on me. And Mike says of course it does, I know, but just, don’t. And we go on telling each other things that we both already know, but feel compelled to say out loud at least once and for some reason that once is this short drive between the burger shack and his apartment, and that is when we run into this crazy person.

I don’t remember this all the way. I know it happened. I remember it with fuzzy edges, and in moments I’ve seen in pictures, and in the warm light of nostalgia and personal history, but I don’t remember it officially. Not clinically. Approximately. It wasn’t a day I was making memories; I was just living my life. It wasn’t that long ago, I was probably twenty-one, twenty-three at most, but it was only a few years ago at any rate. It was either Nana’s birthday, or Mother’s Day, as they were always close together. It could have been an impromptu family gathering, a barbecue at my parents’ house that the whole family attended, but such occasions are exquisitely rare, and almost never happen. There must almost always be a reason. But everyone who was officially a member of the family and not estranged or ostracized, and who lived in the United States was there. My English aunt, who was born before my grandparents emigrated, moved back to the UK as soon as she could and has lived there ever since. She may or may not have been there. It was a pretty nice gathering, and if the photos are any indication, it was a beautiful day. If you ask Mike, there was a lot of gravity to this occasion, but to me, we were just hanging out in my back yard. As the afternoon wound to a close, I must have said something to Mike that I only partially remember, but apparently expressed very eloquently to him.

Mike hadn’t been around for a while. He was in his late twenties at the time, trying to break into the music industry, dealing with some family issues of his own that were at once of immediate concern to me and none of my business, and trying to sort out his life in general. And as a result of all those things, he just didn’t make it to a lot of family parties. I don’t think anyone faulted him for it, as rare as they were, but we had such a solid day that day that I just wanted to say to him, “Hey bud, it was really nice to see you today. I haven’t seen you in a while, and I’m glad you came.” With Mike not around and his older brother Jon living out West, I has become the de facto oldest cousin. It wasn’t much of a burden, but there was the gentlest pressure of a leadership position. With Mike around, at least there was another example of a grown-up cousin for them to take pointers from. All I meant was, its good to have you back buddy. Whatever I said, Mike took it to heart. He gets to birthday parties earlier than I do now.

The crazy person doesn’t look so crazy at first. Just a really slow driver. The quick way back to Mike’s, really the only direct way is down a long road with only one lane going in each direction that runs along one edge of the town that I grew up in. It’s a familiar drive for both of us. The speed limit is twenty-five, which at least in the part of New Jersey I’m from means that the acceptable driving speed is about thirty-five miles per hour. The driver in front of us is doing an etiquette-breaching twenty-three. It is dark, but the taillights are clear and bright, and the body of the car is sleek and shiny. The heart to heart Mike and I are having is punctuated with brief, comfortable silences. The slow driver is tolerated for a mile or so, before gently flash my high beams at him to say, hey, you’re driving very slowly. I flick the two middle fingers of my left hands twice in quick succession, which should make my brights go on in two brief flashes. But my fingers get stuck in the motion, and I don’t pull hard enough with the first flick, so the result is actually one slightly longer flash and one very brief one. This is an error, but the meaning must be read as the same by the other driver, I think. In a moment, the hazard lights activate on the vehicle in front of me. “Now, what the hell is this about?” I start to say, when the lights go off after just a few blinks. I ask Mike, and he says the driver ahead of us has just suggested we go fuck ourselves. This is a frustrating development, but I’m not in such a hurry, so I settle into a snail’s pace for a bit. Mike talks about the big idea he has had recently; he has found schematics for a Do-It-Yourself arcade console that can run every childhood videogame we ever loved. He is excited about it. He tells me about design options: tabletop, stand-alone. This, we jokingly yet seriously acknowledge, is the pinnacle of our youthful hopes. With a reliable source of pizza, a comfortable chair, and a healthy supply of Gatorade, one of these machines would make our childhood dreams come true. This is all either of us could have ever wanted at 8 years old.

We come to a straight piece of road with no other traffic, and I decide we have waited long enough for the slow driver to speed up or get out of the way. There is another car in the far distance, and no other headlights visible, so I judge it safe to pass the slow car. In one motion I slide my car to the left and accelerate. Mike says only, “Dude, you’re crazy.” We both know that he has done the same thing before, and under more questionable circumstances. I take it not as a reproach, but as a joke with the possible implication of a reproach. I don’t address it or react, but remember it for later. As I accelerate to pass the slow car, which I do so quickly but not dangerously, as I want to be safely back in my lane as soon as possible, I notice that the driver of the other car is also accelerating. He isn’t going to let me pass him.  I am angry, I am confused, I am afraid. On the road as we are, there exists a finite set of rules we follow, rules we use to understand each other, and to make ourselves understood. This person is not following our rules, or any rules I have ever heard. As far as I know, I have not done anything to offend this person, but according to the code that is supposed to govern our behavior here, he is acting hostilely toward me. So much so, that he is apparently willing to endanger my life, and Mike’s by racing us, and preventing us from being able to safely pass him before crashing into oncoming traffic. This is confusing to me, unexpected, and alarming.

Quinn was fourteen months old and moving around the living room floor like a mountain climber edging around a narrow cliff. She had not quite grasped walking on her own yet, but she could stand up and move on two feet as long as she had something to hold on to. Sometimes if she was really distracted, she could take a step or two before falling down. She was ready to walk, she was almost there. She was working out the details. Mike’s wife, Kari, was a master interpreter. She spent her days with her infant daughter, and when Mike was outside of his professional atmosphere he could be alarmingly inarticulate. Kari, over the eight years or so of their relationship, had developed a sense for detecting meaning in otherwise nonsensical language. The grown-ups discussed what was for dinner while Quinn unknowingly played Cliffhanger and babbled to herself, and Kari inferred that Mike was in the mood for Stewart’s, which I only knew as a roadside attraction and a brand of soda, not a viable dinner option. The menu looked good, and after we officially sanctioned this departure from standard Pizza Friday procedure, everybody made their picks and Kari made the call. We would have to travel a little bit longer than usual, but I never minded driving. It was the least I could do, considering.

With an indignant swear, I brake, resigned to fall behind the erratic driver again. But much to my alarm, he too brakes, thus preventing me from moving back into the lane not only ahead of him, but also behind him. This action nearly causes a collision, and I apply pressure to my horn liberally. I am angry, I am embarrassed.  I am able to move back into the lane. Mike says something. Something like, “Its not worth it dude.” I don’t look at him. His voice is calm, and I know without looking that he is relaxed in his seat, but his body is alert. He is mildly alarmed, but he trusts me to handle it. He says what I would say, what I already know. His first thought is to diffuse, to keep us both from needless risk. And to get us back to the safety and comfort of his home an family, and to the enjoyment of the delicious junk food cooling in greasy bags at his feet. Mike suggests that we turn off this road at the next opportunity, but I refuse. We both know that we would be going well out of our way, and would have to come back out to this road again soon anyway. I keep a slow pace behind this person, who to me now just must be an unhinged lunatic. I vent a little to Mike, asking him, looking for some kind of explanation of what just happened, and vindication of my own point of view, which I am questioning widely and rapidly. Mike can’t really offer any explanation for what happened. Some people are assholes. We try to resume our conversation, and we do, and I insist on telling him, despite the emotional diversion we experienced, that I not only value the time I spend with his family, but that I love and appreciate him as my friend and cousin, though I stop short of reminding him that he is the older brother I never had. I tell him that I appreciate him as a good and decent man, and I don’t know what I’d do without him. He tells me much the same thing with maybe a pat on the shoulder. If we hadn’t been belted in to a moving car we’d have hugged.

But before any of that, our narrow road widens, and the mad pace car drifts left. As he turns away down a side road, I can’t help but look, and in the window I see an otherwise unremarkable man extending his arm as far away from himself as he can and giving me the finger. He has been such a reckless person, so needlessly vindictive. But he feels he has the right, the need, to offer me a discourteous gesture at our parting. And before I get very far in thinking that I should chase after this absolute fucking jerk and offer him some perspective on his behavior, I am struck by how embarrassed I would to get into an altercation with a stranger in front of Mike. Not that Mike wouldn’t back me up the whole way, but I didn’t want to put him in that position. It turns out, as much as I know now that the deal is sealed, I really want him to like me. And I would hate to breach our unspoken code of conduct, and prioritize attacking a stranger over junk food and videogames. So I continue to the intersection, stop at the light. Proceed to the next light, left turn signal, make the turn, and we’re home.

Blog 9- Short Essay Brainstorm

Ok, so while, hopefully, impossibly, another part of a back corner of my brain, lit strangely and differently and separately from the rest of the space, ponders over and chews on the way that I'm going to make my long essay great, I will use the top and front and awake parts of my brain to talk a little about some ideas I have for the short essay. This one piece I have in mind, I don't know if its creative nonfiction. Not a great start, I know. But here's the thing: its kind of a video, like a visual narrative. So if I do the things that "I" do in a pice, that maybe I didn't do before but I'm doing them now for the sake of the project, where do we land on that? Intuitively I want to say that that's a fake out, that its Daisey-esque. But I think its debatable. Like, if I didn't scurry right across the street the first like I said I did, but I have to in order to film, what details were changed for the narrative, and are they important, and do I make up for it by doing it for filming? And can the piece be the narrative of what I was doing while filming? Am I cheating then? Or am I covering my bases well enough? Or is covering your bases beside the point, and outside of the spirit of the exercise? I think we talk about these questions a lot and come to no answers. And according to my research on the topic elsewhere, neither does anybody else. So, great, we can do whatever we want? Or no, we have to stick together and try and make this thing work, whatever it is, cohesively? I guess we'll see.

Anyway the truth element aside, I want to do text over snippets of video with voice over faded together and edited to be visually distinct, thus creating mini scenes in an already super short narrative. I think that would look real cool, and be fun to do and also to experience. I would need a lot of help. So if I have time and life left in me I will try it, and if I don't I will really dig into writing a really tight, dense short essay, hopefully one that packs the punch that i know all of my work has been missing up to this point. That might even be better. Harder probably and less fun to do but so much better when its done and much more satisfying.

Notes on revision, Essay 2

    This draft lacks coherent and resonant focus. In its next iteration I will remove the parts in the supermarket and focus on the experiences in the car. I am not saying it will end up in this form, but I would like to try it out. I'll focus more on the physical sensations of the experience, and the emotional components, as well as the conversation and relationship between myself and my passenger, my cousin Mike. I didn't like my first draft too much. I put a lot of work into it, well, more work than I had put into my other draft at least, but it came out in a way that was unsatisfying to me. Like maybe it was more technically sound, but it lacked any heart, I think. So I want to correct that, most importantly. The thing I think I really struggle with is "aboutness." I can tell all these stories but making them focused and resonant is a serious challenge for me. Its hard to pick a thing that a story should be about, when its just a thing that happens in your life. Also, I have a fear of rambling and boring people, and I really worry that when I talk too much about myself that nobody is going to care and I'm going to alienate readers. So I'm going to try and get over that, but I'm also going to try and make my reflections concise and pertinent to a central topic in order to prevent my fears from coming true.

Essay 2 Draft 1

I feel like I’m always running out of time. I never have time to do things like fill my gas tank and buy groceries. Somehow those very needed things just kind of don’t make the list, then they’re very-very needed, and I have to squeeze them in at odd hours. For this reason, it seems like every time I’m at the grocery store its late enough that they’re started what appears to be the herculean effort of restocking the shelves for the next day’s business. I haven’t been logging these visits, but I would be surprised to find out if I were always there all that late. Certainly there have been a few 1, 2, 3 AM trips, but I don’t think 11 is that late, and I’ve definitely made it in before that and found the same thing: monolithic stacks of pallets, and the supermarket layout transformed into a labyrinth of carts and oversized boxes, morphing the familiar environs into an altogether foreign, almost industrial atmosphere. The night crew are people who need to get things done. They don’t have time to trouble themselves over appearances. Whoever they might be during the day, with their backs against a deadline, these people become a hive of insects, zealously pursuing their collective goal, and completely overwhelming anything that might offer opposition.

            Disappointed as I was to have again chosen to do my shopping during the magic hour, I held my short list in my head, and made my way around the perimeter of the store, determined to collect only the basics. I was doing well, milk eggs and bread, when I hit a particularly packed stretch of tile back by the butcher’s counter. Just beyond a tall stack of pallets, I could see someone coming toward me, pushing a large hand cart, which itself carried a stack of items the went well over the driver’s head. With nowhere else to go, I stepped sideways into an intersecting aisle and let the man and his cargo rumble past. He saw me about halfway through the maneuver, and quickly recognized what had happened. He smiled in a friendly way, and apologized, though as far as I knew he had done nothing wrong. I said he had nothing to worry about, or something, and he said thanks. And as I took a step back into the aisle I had been trying to travel down, the first thought I had was, “Well, it couldn’t have been that guy.”

            We had been doing about 22 mph for a couple miles when I flashed my high beams at the guy. Just one flash. I had meant it to be two quick blinks but my finger got stuck for a second, so I think it ended up being one slightly longer burn.  A second or two passed, and the hazard lights when on on the car in front of me. ‘Great, this situation,” I had time to think, before they went off again. They had blink 6, maybe ten times. I didn’t know what that meant, but my friend in the passenger seat let me know that the driver in front of me had more or less just invited me to go fuck myself. The driver continued to keep the pace, falling short of the 25 mile per hour speed limit on the long, winding road with one lane going either way- the only direct route back to Mike’s house. With a little bit of an exasperated sigh and a chuckle, I relaxed in my seat and carried on talking to Mike. We talked a little bit about his wife and daughter, waiting at home for us to return with the takeout cheeseburgers and root beers we had gone out to get. We talked about the arcade consoles we were planning to build that summer, and how we would try and build mine on a budget, because I was making minimum wage and couldn’t justify spending rent on videogames, even if this one in particular was a childhood dream come true. Anyway we talked, all the while crawling down the long, dark road that each of us had driven down a thousand times. It ran near the edge of the town I grew up in. I had come back that day to visit, because my buddy, who was actually my cousin, and his wife was taking their baby daughter to the fair in the center of town. Her first time eating chocolate. It was adorable. We spent the afternoon catching up, and I volunteered to drive to get dinner, because Mike insisted on paying. I never minded driving, especially at home. The pressures of driving elsewhere never seemed to get to me there. I could just kind of go where I was going, park where I wanted, and not worry any more about it than that.

            It dawned on me that here, in my hometown supermarket, I was surrounded by people whom I didn’t find in any way threatening, but whom I also did not recognize. I did not know a single one of these people. And because I didn’t get a good enough look at the driver of that car, I realized, hypothetically, any one of these strangers, milling about the cereal aisle at 11:30 at night, could be this person I encountered on the road. A little old man pushed a shopping cart full of meat past me. He kept to his side, I to mine. He wasn’t friendly- he didn’t smile at me or anything- but he wasn’t aggressive, and he didn’t try to use his cart to bully me, out of aisle space, which he might have done, since I was only carrying a basket. It might have been him, or some one like him, but just maybe. Like a 5% chance. I didn’t like him for the role; something about his energy just didn’t match the level of insidious inanity I felt I was up against on the road earlier. I made my way into produce deciding whether or not I would be able to eat a whole bunch of bananas before they went bad, and quietly observing the other late night shoppers as they inspected avocados and hefted packages of celery. They were a motley crew. There’s nothing sexy about picking your way around cardboard towers to sniff at bruised pears under fluorescent lights at an hour when most other people whom you assess as your peers are in their homes reading or watching TV on the internet or holding their lovers or drunk. But despite their low level or wretchedness, nothing stood out about these people to make me suspect they were a dangerous kind of insane. They were clear.

            I wasn’t riding the guy’s bumper or anything. I didn’t honk my horn, not even once. I just kept behind him, close behind him but not too close, and waited for him to move. Coming through a bend, I could see the road ahead was straight for a good stretch. And what’s more, the only car in the other lane was a good long distance away. With no one else around, I decided it would be safe to pass this driver, who had insisted on driving so slowly, and get us home before the baby was asleep and the burgers were cold. I moved left into the other lane and hit the accelerator. I had recently sold my old jeep for a much newer, though still a bit old, Honda. Although it was by no means a racing car, to me it was fast, and I think even objectively, it accelerated quite well. So I hit the gas, not flooring it or anything so dramatic, but enough to move past this person who was holding me up and get back into the correct lane quickly and without incident.

 Much to my surprise, as I had begun to pull past the driver ahead of me, his car too began to accelerate, with the aggressive growling of a powerful engine. He went from even with me, to ahead of me, and stayed there. Much taken aback by this vindictive behavior, it took me a second to really understand the situation. When I did, not fully, but enough to act, I realized I was in a very vulnerable position, at much too great a risk for the potential gain, and quickly hit the brakes in order to move back in place behind the driver, whom felt I now knew to be dangerous and insane. The car in the oncoming lane was now heading toward me, and I had no interest in prolonging our relationship. If I was surprised before, I don’t know if there is a word for what I was next, when,  as I decelerated to move back into the right lane, so too did my evil pace car, which at first prevented me from rejoining the right lane at all, and when I was able to do so, almost resulted in a high speed collision between our two vehicles. Back in the right lane, having heavily leaned on my horn in outrage, I was a little shaken, and more than a little embarrassed that my cousin had experienced that failure with me. I felt like somebody I wanted to like me had just seen a bully give me a wedgie.

[Another supermarket section]

We were almost home when the one lane widened to three, about 100 yards before a traffic light. The guy drifted into the left-turn only lane. The middle was straight ahead, and the far right was straight or right. Now within a mile of home, it occurred to me how pissed Mike’s wife would be about this when she heard the story. I didn’t want to engage this guy or get into a thing with him. I was fighting mad, sure, but I was other things too: sad, and a little shaken. As we approached the red light, I pulled into the right lane. I figured the extra lane between us might be a buffer, should he be crazier than I thought. There was no one else on the road, so it was just the empty lane between us. I was a little scared, but I think I was more scared because Mike was with me. Like I didn’t want to be embarrassed by getting myself into trouble around him. Had he not been there, I might have taken the middle lane. Even so, from the safety of the right side, I couldn’t help myself, and as we drew even approaching the light, I stole a look to my left. The car was turning down a side street about twenty yards short of the intersection, so even though the light was still red, it was only for a second that I saw what looked like a middle-aged white man in a baseball cap, whose car’s interior was clean and sleek, looking straight ahead, but extending his arm at a 90˚ angle directly toward me offering me his middle finger. He never looked at me. It was like he was just doing it in case I happened to look over. He might not even know if  I saw. He might have mouthed the word “asshole,” but it was hard to see. He made a smooth left turn down the side street and was gone. Did I know a kid that lived on that street growing up? Hasn’t I gone to a party in that neighborhood in high school? It might have been that one kid’s house who played hockey and the drums. Or maybe this was somebody else. Maybe I didn’t know anyone who lived over there at all. We continued on our way. The rest of the drive home was uneventful.