As a Texas resident, I know the Buc-ee’s.

I’m in awe in much the same way I’m in awe of strip mining equipment: I’m impressed by the engineering, a little sad that this exists.

Because it’s the near-complete enshittification of the American road trip, taking what was once adventure winding through towns and cities that has been devoid of character and color ever since they finished the interstates.

Don’t get me wrong: if the option is a Buc-ee’s, I’m taking it. Any business that’s discovered the key to consistently clean public restrooms has my undying patronage.

But between their fixation on Coke products and lack of love for truckers, not to mention an expanding footprint that means we’re only a few years away from a Buc-ee’s you can see with the naked eye from the International Space Station, I’m less than enchanted than the hordes of people scooping up Buc-ee’s bites, brisket sandwiches, and exhibiting the kind of sartorial sense once reserved for denizens of the Magic Kingdom.

It’s a theme park with none of the fun and all of the capitalism, playing to the basest instincts of most people on America’s roads: a juxtaposition of a need to feel like we belong to something bigger and to fill the hollow in our collective consciousness with processed meats.

In contrast to the Buc-ee’s, all shiny and new, there are the other places you can stop on the American road. My last job had me on the road a lot in a combination of planes and automobiles, and no, trains weren’t an option.

If they ever reboot that, I hope they cast Katt Williams as John Candy’s Del Griffith, and Ice Cube as Steve Martin’s Neal Page.

Because after Mr. Williams broke the internet on Shannon Sharpe’s podcast, I think that’s the kind of movie we need right now.

I liked being on the road, and in a perfect world, I’ll find something similar that has me on it regularly, but maybe not as often, and not doing the same kind of thing.

I didn’t last long at the job, but it felt longer, because when you’re logging a few thousand miles a week, and about 1/3 of those are by car, time does funny things.

Long after I’ve forgotten my partner’s name or where I last parked, I’ll remember my first day on that job, headed out from the airport for the multi-hour drive across a couple of states, thinking that this is where I belonged.

I haven’t had the feeling often, but it felt like the kind of job that was tailor made for me. Turns out it wasn’t, but perhaps tailor made for my expectations of what I was going to do.

No fault, really, of the company, because even looking back to my first days there, if I knew more about what I was really there to do, and could have seen the path ahead, I would have taken it anyway.

Not just for the job itself, but because I could see a way that doing that for a living might mean doing some actual good, for once. Sure, like all jobs, I’d be part of a larger problem, that of capitalism unchecked, but maybe I could make my little corner of the machine suck a little less.

I am nothing if not a hopeful cog.

Plus, I learned things about myself and about the country I call home that I wouldn’t have otherwise. Saw places in myself and the nation that I’d have passed by if I’d been doing anything else. Growth is ever painful, but it’s growth, and without that we are not as we should be.

I flew out of Lubbock, with Don Henley’s “If Dirt Were Dollars” running through my head. I stopped at a Love’s on the way out, one I ended up seeing a few more times as my path criss crossed America, and I realized that was my first time in a Love’s while on a job.

Up until then, they’d been a stop between stations on a journey more for leisure than lucre, but now, here I was, a Man of a Certain Age, suspecting that he had become unhireable, grateful that at the end of his 1st Act that he’d found work that suited him.

That’s a lot to unpack at a Love’s.

If nothing else, the job stripped away pretension, showed my that the wave I’d been riding most of my life had been made of privilege and hubris, and now, here I was, my own destiny somewhat in my hands, at a Love’s.

There’s nothing magical about a Love’s.

No one’s trekking to a Love’s to update their socials or their wardrobe, swooning over their jerky selection, marveling at the quality of the brisket

No, if you’re in a Love’s, it’s because you don’t, usually, have a choice. It’s because it’s what’s there, and you’re either there for gas, or a bathroom, or some form of sustenance.

Love’s is functional, Buc-ee’s is aspirational

Destination gas stations weren’t a thing before Buc-ee’s. If you travel a route regularly, you know which places you’ll stop, but you wouldn’t go out of your way to see one. As in, pack the family up and make a particular trek to a…gas station.

Which means a Love’s will always feel different than a Buc-ee’s.

People do pass through on their way to their timeshare. But most of the people in a Buc-ee’s are me, the road worriers, people making their living and that just, putting a lot of miles in between places most of you have never heard of.

Sure, the cities you know, but not the places we go, or the way that we get there. Because we’re on a budget that means a stop at a Quality Inn that night would be a step up from last night’s Rodeway. We’re under water on things for reasons from poor life choices to just a poor life.

We’re queuing up for a Subway sandwich even though we should avoid carbs like Jared should avoid schools.

The coffee’s better than it once was, and maybe it’s fresh. Maybe the bathroom won’t be only slightly less moist than the splash zone at Sea World.

And you get your sandwich, and your coffee, and hope that whatever’s making your shoes stick to the floor on your way out isn’t contagious, and you get on your way. Because there’s a world that needs its Buc-ee’s, but another that will always need its Love’s.