Smock Blogs

Somewhere between putting the Kindle down and trying to dial down the yawning abyss enough to close my eyes for the night, I caught up with myself.

I’m not special.

I’m not a Gifted And Talented Man Of A Certain Age.

Instead, I’m someone so afraid of failure and frozen into immobility that I passed up opportunities life had been handing me.

Because I didn’t see a clear path to success for those opportunities.

Couldn’t picture a world where I didn’t fuck it all up.

Wasn’t able to see that it’s not about the mountaintop, it’s about the walk.

I’d call it a journey, but right now, I can’t.

For now, today, it’s just a walk.

Journeys are for The Specials.

Those mythical creatures that can get out of their own way.

And life just plots a course for them.

It was freeing, to know this about myself.

To know that I have nothing to live up to.

No expectations unmet.

I’m a beginner, and I’m not late.

This is where I start.

Not to be special.

Just to be.

I am trapped by the smaller view.

The one in the rearview mirror.

It’s too small to show me what went right.

Only room enough for what went wrong.

Out the front?

Just feels like more space for failure.

More ways to fail.

Or just ways to give up.

To stop moving.

I’m not a roadblock.

Maybe a speedbump.

I know that there’s more out there.

What I don’t know is if I want to see any more of it.

I used to watch The Jerry Springer Show.

I’d have done it ironically, but this was before irony permeated the cultural landscape, in the days before artisanal beanies, baristas, and microbrews.

I did it for less honorable reasons: to feel better about myself.

Because no matter what I had going on, at least I wasn’t getting a chair thrown at me for cheating on my sister with my cousin’s best friend at my uncle’s family reunion.

It’s the sitcom scene where two guys are using the bathroom and one says that no matter how bad it gets, at least he’s not the guy putting the sanitary cakes in the urinals.

The response?

“Yeah, but who does that guy think about?”

In both cases the quest for validation looks outward.

Instead of looking inward, I measure my happiness/contentment/sense of fulfillment by some metric that can be summed up as “at least I’m not them”.

Until life takes a turn, and we are them.

Or closer to them than us.

And all we can do about that chair is duck.

As someone “in between opportunities” in the 21st century, I get a lot of canned responses to job applications.

Usually they package the “nope, not you” nicely enough that it doesn’t sting.

Something along the lines of, “it was a tough call, and we appreciate the level of candidate like yourself applying for this job, but we went with someone else”.

Then there’s:

…you have been unsuccessful due to the calibre of other candidates being more suited…

I mean, it’s saying the same thing, but being told that you’re not of the same calibre as someone else does put a little zing in it.

Guess that makes me 5.56 in a 7.62 world.

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.