Safe Passage

In 1991, I drove across West Texas alone in a pickup truck with no plates and the VIN ground off. At the time, neither of those things concerned me as much as the gas gauge.

I had been alone for a couple of days and was nearly out of gas. The combination was starting to wear on me. Every sound from the engine was the sound it makes right before it dies. Every pair of headlights behind me was coming for me. Never mind that I was driving a truck that looked like evidence—the gas was the real problem.

It was a moonless night and dark. West Texas dark. No towns that I could see, no lights on the horizon, no indication that anything existed beyond the reach of my headlights. Just the road in front of me and the needle getting closer and closer to empty.

Then a gas station appeared.

It was one of those places you are grateful to see from a distance and immediately sorry you stopped at. Buzzing fluorescent lights over the pumps, complete darkness beyond them and an attendant who looked exactly the way the attendant at such a place was supposed to look. Had this been a movie, I would have complained that it was too obvious.

Unfortunately, I needed gas.

I filled the truck without incident, which somehow did nothing to make the place feel less dangerous. I kept looking beyond the lights, waiting for whatever I had already decided was out there to show itself.

Nothing did.

Once the tank was full, I got back inside the truck and pulled onto the highway, relieved to be moving again and convinced that I had just escaped something.

I had been looking in the wrong direction.

My headlights caught movement. Small shapes scattered across the pavement. Then hairy legs. Then more hairy legs.

Tarantulas.

Hundreds of them inside the reach of my headlights and presumably thousands more beyond it. The entire highway was crawling. I had driven into the middle of a tarantula migration, a thing I did not know existed and would have preferred to learn about in some other way.

They were moving steadily from one side of the road to the other, all of them seemingly aware of where they were going.

I tried not to hit them.

I really did.

I slowed down. I swerved left and then right, looking for some clean line through them, but there was no clean line. Every time I missed one, another disappeared beneath a tire.

Tick-tick-crunch.

There were too many. Pick a direction, kill a spider. I was massacring them while trying to avoid them, turning the wheel back and forth because obviously my good intentions would make the truck narrower.

Tick-tick-crunch.

A few minutes earlier, I had been convinced that I was the vulnerable one—a solitary traveler, nearly out of gas, surrounded by darkness in a truck that would have been difficult to explain to law enforcement.

Now I was safely sealed inside steel and glass, and the only actual danger on the road was me.

The gas station eventually became funny. The tarantulas never did.

I kept driving. Of course I did. I had somewhere to be, and apparently so did they. The difference was that I had the questionable yet unquestioned right of way.

Those spiders deserved safe passage, and my destination took that from them. They were simply trying to get somewhere, just like me.

None of us were turning back.

requiem for requirement

picture if you can
the picture of a man
who loses a pixel of his soul
every time he picks up his phone
to post a picture’s worth of proof
of what
he does not know
what he does know
is that for every void he fills
another is created
even knowing this
he cannot stop digging
deeper and deeper
to say
nothing at all
because somewhere
he was convinced
that would be enough
to prove
the destination
was every bit as real
as the journey
it wasn't

Privacy’s pixel degradation

There was a time when you could step into solitude and trust it would hold. A quiet beach, a lonely trail, an empty basketball court with your kid—places where no one was watching, where you could simply exist without an audience. Now, any moment can be interrupted by a camera-mounted murder hornet, and in an instant, that sense of being alone is gone. You’ve become content.

A camera can steal your soul. Call it dignity. Call it autonomy. Call it identity. Every person owns themselves. In many cultures, a person’s image is inseparable from their identity. It isn’t something that should be taken without consent.

What unsettles me about drones isn’t the technology—it’s the disappearance of relationship. No eye contact. No conversation. No opportunity to say yes or no. Just anonymous observation from above. You don’t know who’s flying it, why they’re there, or whether your quiet afternoon has become someone else’s footage. That changes the experience, whether a single pixel is ever recorded or not.

I don’t want confrontation. I don’t want violence. I simply want a world where a father and son can shoot hoops in the middle of nowhere without feeling like they’re performing for an invisible audience. Maybe that’s old-fashioned. But privacy isn’t nostalgia—it’s a basic expression of human dignity, and without it, we stop being people and start becoming property.

I’m not looking for revenge. I’m looking for privacy.

It’s a trap

I lost an estimated 4,000 jumps today to an inexplicable phone/watch glitch, so naturally I rage-repeated the workout.

If there’s no data, did it even happen?

Not that long ago, when I did something dumb like run 10 miles through the city, ride the White Rim Trail, or nearly die kayaking in Alaska, I had a watch, a fuzzy memory, and maybe a rough route if I’d planned ahead. Knowing I’d done it was enough.

Somewhere along the way, accomplishment became documentation. Now my watch crashes, and I’m out there doing another 4,000 jumps just so the numbers exist somewhere.

There’s probably a profound lesson here about external validation, quantification, and the gap between experience and data. I’m self-aware enough to recognize it, but unfortunately, I’m currently too tired from doing 8,000 jumps to fully absorb it.

It’s puzzling

At some point I made a conscious decision to start puzzling as a way to stay focused and keep my anxiety occupied. Which is funny, because on more than one occasion I've ended up one piece short of a thousand.

You never know until you get there, of course. Except sometimes I do. Sometimes I've figured it out before placing that 999th piece, and for a completist there's no worse feeling than an unfinished puzzle. So now I carry a strange form of experiential anxiety: the moment I spot a space I can't logically fill, I start bracing for disappointment.

Still, I persevere to the end. Because you never know until you know, and somewhere in that uncertainty is probably the lesson.

But see that missing piece in the foreground? I'm almost certain it will never be found.

Maybe that's part of the lesson too.

Out On The Tiles

Would that we could all move through the world assuming everyone is a friend, with the kind of optimism born from not knowing that our reputation has already walked into the room ahead of us.