I Looked Up

A story - Part 2

By: Richard Ashrowan

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When one ceases to concentrate on what one wants, the mind is left to a kind of freedom of it's own, over which we can appear to excercise little control. It is almost a dangerous state, which is precisely why achievment is held in such high regard. The highest prizes are awarded to the people who are able to remain consistently distracted from themselves for the longest amount of time. In this way the status quo rewards and maintains itself. For there is nothing more dangerous to the status quo than an untamed, unfettered and undistracted mind. It rambles, it questions, it is so directionless as to become vulnerable to new ideas and new freedoms. You can see why I call it dangerous. There is precisely nothing to be recommended by the mental practice of anything but total, unadulterated distraction. But to be distracted, one has to search out a constant stream of things to be distracted by. Plus a number of secondary fail-safes, in case the first choice of distraction goes through a quiet time in which it ceases to provide adequate all consuming mental stimulation. These are what people call interests. When people do not have these they call it boredom, which is very demoralising to that part of us that likes to avoid life.

Boredom is exquisite, like watching a fish pulled from the water thrash around on the ground. It is a mental torture that the soul delights in. It is painful and completely unnatural, so most people spend their lives desperately trying to avoid it. Some people meditate to avoid it, which in itself is the most boring occupation you could imagine. Others, simply don't allow themselves to get in the sticky position of having nothing terribly important to think about for years on end. But whatever you choose to do, it'll get you in the end. It is a requirement. Hitchhikers, for some reason known only to themselves, make an occupation of it. How they curse, how they scribble messages of hopeless tedium on any roadsign they can find! Now everyone knows that standing by the side of the road is boring. It's not something that requires experience to appreciate. I am convinced that hitchhikers are held in such low esteem for precisely this reason. A bored mind cannot, by default, be thinking terribly important and constructive thoughts. Therefore it is a threat. And people are quite right in perceiving it as such. Most people who drive cars have important occupations, they have generally reached a level of distraction which allows them to feel like members of life, if not even contributors to it. Hitchhikers simply have too much time and too much boredom to even be considered in this context. It is the look of boredom, and the threat which that entails to the eminently distracted achiever, that therefore separates the hitchhiker from his lift.

At this point it is important to distinguish truck drivers from car drivers. Car drivers generally have interesting experiences and occupations at either end of their journey. For truck drivers this is a rare luxury. For a car driver, it is relatively straightforward to avoid boredom, unless they are on a very long trip. They can think about where they came from, they can think about the significance of their destination. They can listen to the radio or a few tapes and ponder the important issues that face them in maintaining their place, or raising their position, in the status quo. It is not so hard. Truck drivers however, understand boredom. The destination, the route, the entire journey can easily be accomplished without significant, or perhaps I should say constructive thought in any respect. They are far more similar to hitchhikers. Therefore two separate approaches are needed. For car drivers, one must be interested in some important issue to the point of complete distraction from boredom. For truck drivers one must be bored. And for the wily hitchhiker it is important to be able to switch between the two seemlessly and without noticeable effort with each passing vehicle.

Now I am not not normally inclined to think in great depth about my position within the status quo. But this approach afforded me both the opportunity and the necessity to do so for suitably brief periods of time. It is true that up until now, my relationship with it had been an uneasy one. There had been nothing quite straightforward about it. I had been neither completely in nor completely out of it. And at the times when I was closest to a feeling of belonging, it had been through an association with its victims. That is if anyone can truly be called a victim. At an early age I had been faced with a choice, as most of us are. This point of decision comes far too early for most people to be able to make any sense whatsoever of the world they live in. I could have chosen to be free and unfettered, to remain perfectly undistracted by the endless possibilities life offered from the release of boredom. Alternatively, I could have embraced these possibilities and ceased to be aware of my existence other than in its relationship to a defined set of achievments. Instead I chose to behave in a schizophrenic manner. I don't mean this in the pathological sense, although, looking back from this roadside, with the passing of traffic and the sum of my life held only in one black wooden case, I now wonder. I chose to associate myself with those whom I really so much admired, the people who entertained themselves not with the maintenance of the status quo, but with a blithe rejection of it. I chose to help them. That was the mistake. So for several years I worked compassionately with drug users, abusers and loonies of one kind or another. I sunk my heart and soul into it. I gained the respect of the community for which I had a secret loathing, by default. I had become in their eyes a protector, a member of the thought police, upholding the moral fabric of their world through compassion rather than punishment. The tools of compassion and punishment may be different, but I am convinced the moral goal remains the same. It is to uphold and protect.

Secretly, unbeknown to either my friend the status quo or to my free thinking companions, I was playing the role of double agent. I never lost one ounce of respect for the lifestyle of my druggies and loonies, I admired them more than I admired myself. They suffered it is true, yet to me they seemed far more alive and far more present than those who maintained the world they rejected. I had secretly harboured the desire to join their world. To wake up one day and cry "It doesn't matter, none of it!". That seemed the ultimate freedom. So I remained a traitor to both parties, living a half life, a disquieting twilight. Boredom and the fear of unstructured thought of course underly both the desire to maintain and the desire to reject the status quo. The are both essentially an entertainment of some kind, equally as worthless.

These thoughts meandered their way through me, coming and going with the traffic, which, with the late hour, had now become more occasional than constant. I stood trying to remember what being a member of society was like. What kind of mental behaviour was necessary to be convincing? It was a long time ago now, several hours in fact. I found it hard to recall. A structure to life, I thought, was far more fragile than I had ever before realised. It was built upon almost nothing of inner consequence. We let go for a moment and it is gone forever. That the most fearful become the most tenacious is their curse.

The next lift I got was a bored Glaswegian truck driver who entertained himself with an in depth explanation of all his conquests with women, his physical triumphs over innumerable bouncers at clubs and a detailed account of the merits of all the different kinds of DAF's and Scania's he had driven. The time passed and I politely agreed with everything he said. He had one phrase which he used to describe both his enemies and the people he admired most "fookin bastads!".
"I'll tell ye about one guy I knew, he was a right fookin bastad he was. He stabbed a copper to death, jus' for being asked to leave the pub. What a smart fookin bastad eh!" He said it with justified admiration.

We smoked cigarettes, we stopped for strong coffee, the night was in its prime, the early hours had their advantage over us. It was by no means an uninteresting lift, but we had the kind of exchange that exists between two people who are fundamentally disinterested in each other, yet nonetheless we both fulfilled a valuable purpose. We slowly conquered the night. He dropped his load off in some soulless yard, picked up an empty trailer and drove me to a service station close to Carlisle. It was still dark. As I climbed down from his cab I felt an ache of sadness. I didn't know his name. I wondered if he felt as lonely as I did at that moment. I wondered if his whole life were made of those moments.

I thought I would wait for a little while for the world to start to wake up again, so I went into the cafe for coffee. It was dead, there was one man slumped asleep over a table. Wondering how long it would be before anyone realised he was actually a corpse, I ordered coffee from a waitress who was unbearably sprightly, having just started her shift. The whole place, excepting myself, had a feeling of impending dayness about it. The breakfast counter was being uncovered.

"That's one ten" she said
I stared at her blankly, as if she'd spoken an indecipherable dialect.
"Forgive me, it's the time of day, I don't know if I'm here or there"
I was having to muster normality from some place other than within myself. I couldn't seem to remember anything at all. Two men came in and ordered coffee and toast. I watched them to see how to behave. I sat for a while, quite overcome with weariness. The two men were full of life, I had more in common with the corpse.

I made my way heavily to the exit, crossed the forecourt of the petrol station and installed myself close to the exit sign. I was completely possessed by the deep loneliness of the oncoming dawn. The first truck that came by stopped.

"Where are you going?" I asked
"Edinburgh, close to the airport" he replied
"That's great, it'll do me fine"

He was an older man, in his late fifties, slightly built. He spoke softly, with a gentle lowlands accent. Edinburgh, I thought, would be a suitable end to my journey. It was warm, the radio was on, he didn't seem to need to talk. It was pure relief. I sunk into the seat, lit a cigarette and drifted. I must have slept for a while, as the light was spreading across the most beautiful low hills when I next looked out. Relief spread through my whole body. How long it had been since I had seen a horizon! How cold and grey it looked, how natural! For twenty nine years had I been waiting for this release. How stupid I had been! As if guessing my thoughts the driver turned slightly toward me and spoke.

"I just like to have someone here, you know when you're on a long journey, it feels nice to have someone in the other seat" he paused. "These hills, I know them like the back of my hand, put me anywhere on this road and I'll tell you exactly where you are. They're never dull. Sometimes in winter, when it snows, the snow piles high on either side, to the point where it's like driving through a tunnel, single lane."
"It must be very beautiful to see this every day"
"You're from London, you've left for good haven't you?"
"Yes, it all got too much" I had a whole host of replies ready for that question and this was the most innocuous. "How did you know?"
He smiled gently, keeping his eyes on the road in front, pausing before replying.
"My son lived there, he's been in trouble, it's too much for anyone, he's back with us now."
"It's been a long time since I've seen the dawn on a horizon"
"Ay, it's good for the soul. Every day I drive along this road, for the last three years." A small town with tower blocks came into view to the right, he nodded toward it. "See that place, it used to have a ship yard. They just closed it. Those blocks are still full, there's no work now. Too many drugs, too much crime. It makes me sore. But what can you do? Heaven only knows what kind of a life they can lead. You're doing the right thing, it's good to get out"

He stared straight ahead now, he seemed neither upset by the thought of his son, nor by the thought of the people in those tower blocks. He had reached the point where he could only observe and feel. Those words "What can you do?" seemed to hang in the space between us. There was a peaceful release for both of us in it. It was a question put as a statement of philosophy. The movement of the truck, the dominance of the hills, his age and my youth, seemed to lend its very hopelessness a timeless and perfectly acceptable truth. Quite unexpectedly, he continued.

"You must be looking for something up here, you're still searching?"
"A few hours ago I knew only what I no longer wanted, now, somehow everything looks different. But if you're asking me what I'm looking for, I really don't know. I'm pretty tired I guess."
"Ay, it comes on you like that. Give it some time, it'll all come clear up here."

He spoke in the rare way of someone who had no need of experience to teach him what he already knew. I felt like a fumbling idiot. I doubted whether he had ever needed a comparative lifestyle to teach him the quiet value of his own. We drove on in the silence of shared understanding. The radio went on, some inane idiot prattling away in forced early morning jollity about the French, frog's legs, french accents, placenames. We talked for a while about Edinburgh and he advised me kindly about how to go about finding places to stay.Then there was music, some Madonna song which was in the charts at the time came on.

A lump came to my throat. The song was sublimely sentimental and I fought to suppress the tears. On the threshold of tears there is usually hope. It's what differentiates it from the dark depression of sadness, which rarely brings tears. Hope is what makes tears so very beautiful. It was the rediscovery of that feeling , which I had not only forgotten but rejected, that brought the tears. I had no thought of all I'd left behind, it was long gone. I had no thought of the future, that was irrelevant. I was on the threshold, with a hope such as I'd never felt before for company. It was unhampered by desires, ambitions, plans or missions. We approached the turnoff, close to Edinburgh. He stopped by a roundabout and I climbed down.
"Goodbye, and thank you" I said
"Good luck" he replied "You'll be fine."

As he drove off, I felt the fresh softness of the wet grass beneath me. The road was filled with early morning rush hour traffic filing into the town. There were a few tedious suburban houses around. I asked a passerby the time. It was 8.30am. My small battered case upended, I sat upon it and lit a cigarette. There were streams of traffic, people awake, engaged with the hopeful act of living. I had all the time in the world, a vast and endless space that seemed to stretch from here to forever. Every breath, of fumes and cigarette smoke, felt like the inhalation of a pure heavenly vapour, a vapour that had its belonging in eternity.

I LOOKED UP - A JOURNEY - PART 1 - By: Richard Ashrowan - We had become partners, the clouds and I, every bit as willing to fling myself upon the wings of those same passions.