June 19, 2010
RELAX
“RELAX” read the t-shirt in bright red block letters, hanging from the shoulders of a man standing five feet to the side of his Buick abandoned in the drive of a BP station: lights on, one door open.
Thick arms, flushed red, hung stiffly out the shoulders of his tank top, ending with clenched fists.
His horseshoe mustache framed a mouth that belted screams of rage into the night:
“I’ll find you!”
“I’ll kill you!”
One girl from the suburbs cowered nearby in her parked car.
From somewhere could be heard a teenager’s giggle.
Five people pumped their cars full of gas.
comments
Leave a Reply
RELAX read the letters on the gay boy’s sweatshirt – lettering in grey with white outline – the sweatshirt was hot pink. Pair this top with some Marithe Francois Girbaud grey “puff” jeans with snaps at the ankles. Now imagine the petite red pseudo tennies I wore to complete the ensemble. (sigh)
I really am gay.
Good point. 20+% of all oil produced is used by Americans–and delivery is all someone else’s problem? American price pressure and American desire to share in all profits far and wide make it a bit silly to so cleanly separate liabilities.
Maybe if the US hadn’t been so cozy with all big oil, we could have had enforced regulations that would have prevented the oil gusher in the Gulf.
Randy Taylor don’t want no gotdam oil in his gulf, Randy Taylor wants gas in his tank and wants some ass kicked if any of it has fucking pussy Ethanol in it made by fuck-me-with-corn people who aren’t from Texas, dammit.
Daryl, I hear you. And I can’t help wondering how much I’m party to this disaster. Danny and I have a car we have the luxury of filling up any time we want. And going places we want to go anytime we please. Please understand I’m not holding BP inculpable. Still they were/are still delivering. An we’re still filling up. Are we really willing to shut the fucker down? We have a war on the coastline. How is it different from any other war we’ve been party to? There will be casualties.
We may not have seafood from the Gulf. We’ll still go to the gas station. We might have less gasoline one day, and line up for a gallon or two.
I hope you know I’m being a little fecetious. But I can’t help believing every time we start our cars, we should think about what the turning of that key brought to the gulf, to what impact we brought the gulf.
We can blame BP, and perhaps rightly so. But we’ve come to the point where we all need gasoline. And there are those who will supply it, whatever the cost. We are not without guilt.
For full disclosure – this one’s mine, and amazingly (to myself at least) it’s not even a contrivance for the sake of argument – rather a document of an odd scene at the neighborhood convenience mart I dropped by to take advantage of a special on gatorade.
Between the disconnect between the shirt, the ferocious anger, and the apathetic to comedic indifference of the lookers on, something felt curious and bigger than itself about the scene.
I have to confess, it wasn’t until yours & Rick’s comments, Daryl, that I realized how largely the scene and the indifferent gas pumping could be read. You’ve a keen eye.
And Dan, you rock!
And Michael, you rock more than I. Had I not been blinded by my memories of those puffy jeans and my cute shoes, I might have paid attention to the subtext.
Overheard from the recent family reunion we attended, “Them towel-heads are the cause of all this…[he went on from there, but I stopped listening]…” It seems that each of us draws causal relationships between what we see in the world and what we experience as individuals. It certainly must be more complex a web of interaction, and yet I find myself pulled to the most likely culprit – or perhaps the most convenient one (based on where I am and who is around me at the time).
Michael, Thanks for posting this. It makes for a great parable of many aspects of American myopia. No problem is seen until it hits home–with home being a bubble of comfort that will fit into an airconditioned F250 dualie.