Greedy Hypnosis

something new

Nothing will become of nothing; King Lear cross stitched behind my eyes. I have nothing to write about; I did nothing all summer. I spent weeks on the MassPike and did not realize I had been bleeding all over the road until it was over. The hypnosis is greedy, it’s bleak. Fifteen dispensary ads with veiled encouragement to smoke and drive cloud my vision as I drive through Springfield. 420 meters from Exit 23B… your favourite dispensary! and Have you tried our drive-thru option? This creates enough roadkill this time of year to feed us all for the winter, if we were smart about it. There’s something nasty eating the roadkill, because we won’t, and eventually the zombies will get faster.

My fingernails, usually staying stuck to their assigned finger, have begun to move around and experiment with change. They tap schitzo beats across the steering wheel, garden hose, cardboard pages, and metal straws; they pinch cheeks, blueberries, pie crusts. What don’t they touch: a good smooth rock, a hand that doesn’t shake. STOP HANDGUN VIOLENCE, I jump at the billboard’s screen, turning around in my seat to watch it fade, to make sure it’s gone. The blue car that I thought had gotten off an exit ago has been in my blind spot for at least five minutes. I pass her, and she veers to my other side, almost kissing my bumper. There’s construction ahead, but the road is void of warning signs and hard hats. The lanes will change; I speed up, squeezing the car through the cement fences that now dictate the road. On the other side of this construction is more pavement. Is there a ‘longest road’? The MassPike could be the longest road in the world. Some roads change their names in the middle, a transgender thing, I don’t know. Does name or pavement determine the length of a road? The martyrs beg for the pavement’s defeat. They don’t even know what ‘name’ means; the asphalt is hot as hell on porcupine feet. There’s no excuse for these five lanes— I drive them all at once to prove it— and if we weren’t all on our phones I bet we could even drive in single file. But what fun would that be? I don’t remember if Sisyphus ever gets the rock to the top of the hill without it rolling back down again. My eyes are closing by themselves again. Did the mountain show proof of his labour? Or did it renew each time he began again, perhaps to convince him that no matter the stone, no matter the day, it all meant shit. Mascara becomes heavy on the Pike, and sticky too. My eyes sing sweet lullabies, but I’ve been kidnapped by them before. I should probably stop for gas.

I don’t even have to crash the blue car myself. Auntie Mary Jane’s billboards are colors that would scare an epileptic; a skunk farting out a weed-shaped cloud takes that driver out, but it means nothing to me. This skunk, named ———, flickered in and out of existence as her fart blazed up and stunk up the blue car’s skeleton.

Does the road know that the pavement is coming undone? The animals that live below are revolting, clearly. The road is littered with corpses of the martyred— you know they are martyrs because no one stops to stare! A good hurricane could tear up this whole road, and with it the commonwealth… maybe we should give more money to the police. No other cars have all their windows down; I can’t hide from the screams of the tires. Voices we make up mingle with my grandmother’s, creating ghosts for my conversational pleasure. I can make a ghost out of any bottle, pill, or smoke, with the wind. The ghost comes with the sound of my grandmother’s heavy keyring hitting the steering column of the Subaru. The sleepy blink of her hazards and the classical CDs of her car are transferred to mine; she’s not dead, but appears to me now as a ghost, to take over the wheel, while I curl up like a child in the back seat. Back there, I thank God, covering my head in a red towel so he can’t see the shame on my face. I’m sick of this fucking stomach pain.

The lisp of summer has caught me, just as August’s actions turn to stone. The wheel of fortune blinks and coughs, spinning into a left turn without looking both ways; a black cat appears in the tall grass and asks if you can rescue him. You can, and you do. You can know a black cat for years without being able to pet him, then get him in your lap. The scars on his chin remind me of magic, and I hesitate to touch them. Through the skin, I can see his soul. Devotion stares back, and I do not dare to touch it. My grandmother drives steady in the right lane, never going above seventy.

Blueberries, ripe and unripe, congeal in my lungs. Some are big and some are small. I like my blueberries purple, tart, and popping. The berries in my lungs are Driscoll’s and are immune to my hippy pesticides; the berries in my mouth taste just right. My grandmother is used to me throwing up in the backseat— I have been carsick all my life. The marijuana billboards have stopped, for now, if only out of respect for my grandmother.

I get tired of the towel and take a sip of my grandmother’s hot chocolate, leaving the backseat. Before I’ve even made it to the front, she has disappeared, and I grab the wheel before we careen into Worcester. It was a close one, and the billboards came back just to spite me. Some of them sing, but I’ve begun speeding up when I’m close to them so I don’t have to hear it.

It’s no use talking about what we are all smoking; the most popular drug is Whatever Fucks You Up The Most. I’ve fallen victim to the Pike; the Target logo on the truck I am tailgating swings, a hypnotist. Goldrush creeps in towards the guardrails, pulling at steering wheels. There are a lot of accidents on the Pike.

Why Is The National Gaurd Picking Up Trash? The democrats ask me this from the steps of AIPAC; Kamala Harris would never have done this to me! She would have saved me from the world viewed through my Twitter screen. The front page “PROGRESSIVE” gets asked about a question they should be prepared for, so they call Dick Cheney to get no one’s vote, and The New York Times lets them get away with it. I should be president of the goddamn country if all it takes is a contagious vernacular and no one telling me when my makeup looks weird. When I was young— and couldn’t drive, leaving me without time for these thoughts— I had no idea what the president of the united states was supposed to look like. I didn’t watch much news after the Al-Qaeda beheadings, but Obama’s blue and red face loomed large. Haha, who remembers when he wore a tan suit! Even now, almost white with sun, Obama posters glint on walls and in windows. HOPE mocks me then and now; I asked my dad what a drone strike was in the Mazda dealership, as NPR does not provide definitions. He said it was the most effective way to get the bad guys, because our good american soldiers on the ground didn’t have to get their hands dirty. BE ALL YOU CAN BE! Kill some innocent men, women, and children! FOR MARINES, THERE ARE ONLY BATTLES WON. The American Sky whistles as I drive by, stepping on the gas. I can’t get the flag out of my mind. Selena Gomez, via Barney, replays in my head and sings about Betsy Ross. I’m going to kill myself if I don’t eat something. I pledged allegiance to this flag every day at school; the religious devotion I was told to give gave me nightmares. I would doze off and dream of being reincarnated as an American Flag, always at half-mast, always folded wrong by too-eager Boy Scouts.

When I am driving, I am not looking at the road for any other reason than to spot my ex-boyfriend’s car before he spots me. Despite the billboards and the martyrs, I search for the car I know fell victim to drive-thru weed. He could be dead— I miss the guardrails. You can live if you hit a guardrail, but these cement motherfuckers aren’t playing around. This greedy boy doesn’t know how to let my mind go; the only home I want to return to is behind me, and you can’t U-Turn on the Pike. These are the times when I wish I were a marine, so I didn’t have to lose battles.

I think I’m going to get off at this exit to eat a bagel. I put on my blinker before cutting across two lanes, hoping the line is less than fifteen minutes. This bagel shop, one of about six, makes the best fucking bagels in the world. Unfortunately, their employees are all avid billboard readers and democrat believers, so they work really slowly and get your order wrong. In the line, I miss the Pike. I can’t look any of these people in the eye. I took the wrong fucking exit and went to Vegas, I’m seeing so many bats. Some bats have fish for heads, some have fish heads, and some just seem scaly; these bats like bagels. I did not respect their bagel order. Who orders three toasted plain bagels? I’m worried she is going to feed them to the ducks, but when I try to grab her, she is too slick. I’m almost at the front of the line, and I’m getting antsy. There is a Panera next door, and I bet I could get enough bread bowls to feed all these people before I get served. Just before I leave the line, it’s my turn. I forget what I’m ordering, distracted by the tip jars. There are two tip jars, asking people to vote while they tip; AMERICA. The two options I am presented are Music and Reading, which seems like a stupid question to ask bats, even if some of them are fishy. This would be the perfect place to practice ecolocation, if I had taken any lessons. My bagel was going to take forever, and without ecolocation, I was alone. I resist the urge to pull out my phone; the bats next to me watch me twitch every time my phone vibrates. I don’t notice my goosebumps rising, but I feel them the same. I have become ensconced by a ghost in the bagel shop, and I don’t even know who it was. I remember the hands— I guess I’ll have to find them again. And Thank God, my bagel’s ready, because the hands in my dreams do not belong to a bat.

Out of respect for my GPS’s estimated time of arrival, I waste no more minutes and eat on the road. It’s easier to eat the faster you go, because eventually the other cars stop coming close to you, and you don’t have to worry about them at all. I’m dripping fucking aoili down my face, though, and two thugs from Boston are laughing at me. My arrival time has gone up by thirty-seven minutes; unacceptable! The bagel was worth it.

My final destination is a secret. I can’t tell you where the MassPike takes me, just as you can’t tell me where it takes you. If we went around telling each other where we went all the time, or posting photos of our real-time location online, surely lots of people would be getting murdered! The mass shooters are the serial killers— forensic science really put a damper on serial killing, but nothing could dampen this Eagle’s Rage! The imperial boomerang has ‘ranged my town, your town, and the waters we share with the whole world.