#604 Rest Stop

3 disturbing coincidences: the first brings perception of moral authority into question, the other two focus that perception, through surreality and then pin-point clarity. 3 events happen at a rest stop on i-10 as one travels North through the mesa chaparral, which serves as an elevator from desert to mountain, from Phoenix to Flagstaff.
The first happens in the form of a chance conversation with a silver haired big bellied retiree, through which you discover a mutual acquaintance. He clutches a styrofoam cup of cream powder and 3 hour old coffee, brewed by a volunteer from Black Canyon city. You finish a second can of sugar free Red Bull. If coffee cooks for 3 hours the molecules change, and it produces the shakes. If you drink two cans of sugar free Red Bull you get the shakes. The mutual acquaintance is a woman against which you committed an unforgettable wrong: and though you perceive he knows nothing of it, that refuge fades, as the details of a series of cold calculations slither into present consciousness, like so many rattle snakes on a warm sidewalk.
The conversation ends, and as he makes his way back to a royal purple Lincoln Town car you bend at the waste– an attempt to coax knotted lower back muscle into a neutral state. But when you rise the scene re-draws itself in a monotone of green-orange fade to black, here and there, back and forth, brought to you by suspended floods (paid for by tax dollars,) and Taurine, and memory. And your head thobs, and demands to be seated, and vision blurs at the periphery, and the drone of trucks in idle, once Catholic in their muted insistence, now become jury and appointed attorney. Will we ever escape judgement?
There is a razor sharp switch blade in my pocket that I have fantasized about brandishing, in the case of sudden attack in a rest stop restroom. There is a camera in my hand, which I have used to clarify and extend fantasy, that now demands my full attention. There is a series of cold calculations one makes prior to capture. They remain concerned about movement and time and narrative and relationship to some archive. There is a process of detaching from those choices so as to present the opportunity for a sweet loving bitch to lose herself in your soul. And there is a moment when that bitch, now your lover, coaxes a button push, sometimes in rapid fire succession, sometimes in detached refrain, and sometimes with reckless abandoned, without regard for consequence. And sometimes coincidences come together to form a vision of judgement, transcendence, guilt, folly.