Controlled Scribbling

Traveling North Towards Home

I got back from Georgia last night. The words 'Where the fuck did all this traffic come from?" are still ringing in my ears. My little sisters took turns driving down as I rode shotgun doing my best to keep my wits as well as the correct tape in the player. Julie, the youngest at a not-so-innocent nineteen, drove most of the time. Twelve hours each way and every time she saw more than three cars on the road in front of her she gasped perplexed, "Where the fuck did all this traffic come from?" I say 'every time' and I know I am not a stranger to exaggeration, but in this case when I say 'every time' I mean without exception 'every time.' At first it seemed to be just another throw-away rhetorical cliché type thing, but after about eight hours in the car it began to take on the qualities of an age-old unanswered philosophical question. By the tenth hour I began to wonder if there was perhaps an answer I could give her that would put it all to rest. "Where the fuck did all this traffic come from?" Somewhere. It had to come from somewhere. Didn't it? I mean it can't just be here without origin. God? God. What about that? I thought it could be. Time passed and I pondered. Another small pack of cars appeared in front of our speeding car and as predictable as the hammer to the knee reflex, she gasped, "Where the fuck did all this traffic come from?" "God," I said with shaky confidence. I had just spent about a half hour in a state of deep thought and in theory I liked it. Most theories completely fall apart the instant they leave the realm of their creator's mind and enter the world to be examined by others. A lot of these theories spend much more time in their creator's mind than twenty minutes, but I thought I would throw this out in the arena to see how it would do out in the open. Philosophizing might make the last hour of the trip go faster. The sharing of theories and great ideas. A think tank flying down the highway. "God," I said again. My little sister looked at me and shouted as if I was a football field away and hard of hearing, "WHAT?" The beginning of intellectually stimulating conversation in an open forum. "God, that is where the fuck all this traffic came from," I said calmly with a spark of enlightened hope in my voice. Now we will start to pick at this idea and critique its strong and weak points. I realize I could be considered a guy who is just an Art School drop-out, but I like to think I am somewhat clever and creative. My sister is an "A" student at a respectable state university and has many interesting views on many aspects of life. My sister looked back at me for an instant and then back to the traffic in question in front of her. "Fuck you, Dennis." Silence filled the car between songs on the spinning tape and I took a heavy sigh. The car swerved violently all over the road which was nothing to worry about; it was just the way she liked to drive. We careened through the cars and accelerated into a barren patch on the highway. Moments passed and, much to my sister's surprise, another batch of six or seven cars appeared in front of her and they all refused to drive at eighty-five miles per hour. "Where the fuck did all this traffic come from?" "I don't believe in God," I thought to myself and shrugged my shoulders.

I have come to the conclusion road trips should be done in airplanes where the traffic controllers are far away from you. You know they are saying it but at least you can't hear them. "Where the fuck did all this traffic come from?"