Strangers in the Night

I meet a lot of wildlife at gas stations, especially late at night. 

The cheap wood-paneled hallway of memories of tours past in my mind is alive with the sound of neon bulbs flickering on and off. They sing like the crickets of that anti-natural space. The smell of diesel. The chunking of the fuel regulator doling gallons into the tank of the van or the bus, everyone else has disappeared inside the gas station, or asleep in the vehicle. It is one of the most isolating feelings you can have without panicking. It’s a temporary exhale in a life of managed chaos that is touring. It’s often beautiful. And it often puts my imagination into hyper mode.

We, the band and I, mostly travel at night and in temperate-ish weather, so the memories of tours past recall  billowing warmth, lots of west Texas type of air. There is always a breeze. It’s like you're having a pillow fight with a ghost. Technicolor pop machines, neon signs, beer signs, broken plastic, garbage; the sinister hint of agricultural stubble at the edge of the circle of neon light that contains you and this gas station. It’s like life is only safe and familiar close to these barracks of “ inside the light.” Outside the circle is just miles of reaped dust and the labyrinthine tracks of mindless, megalithic harvesters that raze the mindless reprogrammed corn in slow motion. You can stand at the edge of a darkness so flat and expansive it looks as if you could walk off into the night and go forever.. I take a few steps to try it, I am pretending I’m in the movie “Paris, Texas” but a few steps out I stumble over the footprints of machines with tires twice my height and it hits me that I couldn’t run out into it even if I had to. It’s not for living things to traverse, at least not humans.. I thud to the ground and my palms meet the dried wave of former mud and corn stubble. Anything living was smashed and dried into these tire shapes like they died in Pompeii. It’s as though you cannot enter or leave the circle of light unless you are in a vehicle with a gas-powered engine. Your van is essentially a space ship. No one walks here. I stand up and dust myself off, as I’m turning toward the van I’m hit with a triggering, confusing whiff of death and shit; a factory feedlot miles away... then the song on the service station loudspeaker reels me back in. “How do you like it, more more more… how do you like it, how do you like it…"

Early on in the mid to late 90s we all wondered how it was that we were in these great “food producing” regions but there was no food to be found? Not a vegetable in sight that hadn’t been boiled then frozen then boiled again. It was my first experience of the reality of a homogenized industrial food system. Vast monocultures of corn and beef and soybeans. Not much else besides an occasional bird flitting by or a fat bug exploding against the windshield. It’s sad, but that is how I have seen some of the most beautiful insects on this continent -- by scrubbing them off the glass or picking them out of the front grill. 

On and within the fringes of the highway systems there are still elements of a bygone sensationalist, exploitive circusy era clinging to the surface of the earth by their claws. Outside a gas station near Van Horn, Texas I saw a small dog kennel surrounded by a chain link fence, anchored in place by janky hand-poured concrete. Inside that atrocity was a live male peacock. He was in a very hot, inescapable jail cell for me, the customer. The ribbon of overkill on this package was an actual lock on his cage should anyone try to steal him. This is one of those examples of human extinction looking pretty rosy, and one of the many memories I wish I could expunge.

Much like the memory of a truck stop somewhere in the mid-prairies -- concrete dinosaurs in patented Sinclair green, claw machines, giant sit-in driving video games (sounds fun after driving all day?), buck hunting game, and fantasy Kung Fu. Banks of pay phones, pull tabs, showers for truckers. Mass-produced American flag crap, Diesel treat, big ashtrays, resin figurines of white tigers and Harley Davidsons, on and on, etc. As I was just about to make my way down the long wood paneled corridor to the restroom, I saw a large glass display case on a white pedestal. It had no place in this weird island cruise ship mall of crap so I looked closer. Inside was a stuffed Whooping Crane. I was shocked. I looked into its dead eyes. I saw its red cap plastered back with a slight sheen of dust. It looked ashamed. I was overcome with rage and grief. I rushed into the bathroom and cried. I wanted to buck-hunt every asshole in that place and then turn the leashed gun to my own head. Though it wasn’t the first time, I was flooded with the feeling that our world makes us all just a means to the end of everything good! And it stabbed me in the heart. I want out of this cycle!

But the small creatures come and go like there is nothing strange about this at all. They remind me that life surges and adapts. At other, less weighty times, I have been observed by a barred owl who was perhaps hunting rats near the dumpsters. It was unaffected by my scary, smelly humaness. It knew we were contained by the lights and posed no threat. I was in a zoo staring back at its bright face from my fish tank made of that pool of light. 

The lights are everything, they are what make this unnatural night-world happen. I’ve watched bats swoop in in large numbers and gorge on the swarming insects who could not help themselves from hurtling full speed towards the fluorescent abyss. Why the light?? Nighthawks coming in low and silent, picking the bugs out of the air, their underwing bars making them resemble Messerschmitts in WW2 footage. They are so unusual, and they are all business. I love when nature doesn’t give a shit what we've built. I’ve seen entire buildings and their blacktops covered in katydids, white moths, cicadas; parking lots filled with rabbits happily going about their business. Grackles moving en masse and shitting their purple shit everywhere. My poor bandmate getting sprayed by a stinkbug is still one of my favorite memories and makes me laugh even now. It sounds mean, but he’s no dummy and the ridiculousness of being pooped at while pumping gas does not escape him. Poop is the great equalizer.