During our last shift before the snow, my friend told me about the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, which occurs after someone learns something new and subsequently encounters it frequently thereafter. Or at least they think they do.
He imagined having the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon about the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, which was very clever. We were putting plastic bags of carrots, which arrive in a much larger plastic bag, onto the shelf. At least I was.
I think I was having the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon after learning that Bikini Bottom is situated beneath the Bikini Atoll nuclear weapon test site, and maybe that the characters are genetic mutations from said nuclear testing. The machine in my pocket kept telling me it. In videos. Reddit posts. One with an AI-generated Joe Rogan voice that haunts me still.
I wouldn’t have known that growing up, as I wasn't allowed to watch Spongebob. Or for that matter The Simpsons, which probably shows. I am constantly reminded that I exist at a deficit, in more ways than I could ever hope to understand.
My friend at the store wanted my advice on what to order for the coming snow, which is a real loaded question as far as the high stakes world of suburban grocery stores goes. I have been asked often to predict the future of produce sales and I have always answered. But it’s never been the right one. This week would be no different.
“Not much” I said, and went home.
Before the snow, we sold everything.
Even the celery.
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On my first commute, I noticed the road signs on the interstate, those ones that invariably stick to the formula of clever driving pun sandwiched with the year’s driving-related death total. The total was still small, after the calendar reset. It’s only January.
This morning they all said: TRAVEL NOT ADVISED.
But to me it looked like: YOU DUMB ASS.
Still, I kept driving, that day and all the rest that came, for no real reason that I can articulate other than that I was scheduled to work. Which is supposed to mean something, but I can’t remember or never learned exactly what that is. The easy question really is who else would be venturing onto this sub-zero goddamn graveyard full of metal husks who hasn't been scheduled to do so by higher forces? Which really slaps that whole self-determination thing in its frozen face if you think about it too long, like maybe when you are driving in the snow when travel is very clearly and repeatedly not advised to meet a driver and unload a truck full of strawberries and orchids that traveled there likewise.
Despite working in retail since my mom had to drop me off at the store for my shift, my understanding of economics is a lot like my knowledge of Spongebob and The Simpsons: I am operating at a severe deficit. I’ve been told throughout my life to picture a chain, or a faucet, or a pyramid. I’ve come to understand it best by imagining laying on the ground and looking up into the cavern of a bell.
The lip that runs along the bottom, now that’s where all the action is. But damned if it isn’t hard to break into. So, you and I, we serve as the clappers, desperately rattling around in that big empty hole, pulled by either wind or wages, and making that dreadful economic music.
Our digital time clock at work makes a sound when you clock in. It’s not a bell, but it should be. It really should. What a strange feeling, when you clock in and you are the only one in there and you haven’t fully-morphed yet into the person wearing the nametag.
When you're still just some guy, tracking in snow you know you will have to mop up before you open.
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“You are a very prideful person,” another friend says when I arrive one morning in my boots, which means it’s serious outside and I am taking it seriously by wearing my boots. This time it took me an hour to get in.
“You know pride always comes before the fall,” I said like an asshole, then pantomimed falling.
Later, when I was shoveling out the parking spot where I watched a hit-and-run last week, I slipped and fell a great pirouette: both hands thrown skyward, snow shovel launched upward, falling on my arm I use the boxcutter with.
My boss hung up the phone and came out to ask if I was hurt. Lots of people get hurt out here in the retail wars. He was prepared to file paperwork.
I said, “No. Just my pride” and shoveled on.
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It becomes increasingly unclear as the week progresses whether there are actually more vehicles stuck in the banks and corralled by the median, or if I’m just looking for more of them to be there.
“Wait, weren’t you an Amazon truck yesterday?” I ask the Walmart truck jack-knifed after a slight curvature of the interstate.
It doesn’t answer, just blinks its red Morse code out towards the fields and wreckers, who will be busy for days out here, picking up these cautionary tales.
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While I was eating frozen macaroni and cheese with corn chips in the break room alone, the machine in my other hand told me about Michel Lotito, who, over the course of his life, ate 15 shopping carts, a waterbed full of water, and a Cessna light aircraft. The gatekeepers over at Guinness even gave him a plaque for his ability to eat generally inedible matter.
And he ate that too.
Lotito died at 57 of "natural causes," which surely looks a lot different for a man who had already eaten a coffin. Handles included.
On the way back home, I couldn’t help but imagine Michel Lotito out along the interstate behind a Ford Focus with a silver knife and fork in hand, just sitting at a bistro table tucked beside the biggest drift. And he was wearing a napkin bib that said "DETROIT MUSCLE."
Or something else clever and automobile-adjacent.
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Harry Crews wrote a novel called Car. It is about a man who eats a Ford Maverick in a Las Vegas hotel convention center. He does so for money. And for pride. It is a book I will leave Karl over at Goodreads to describe:
If you aren’t familiar with Crews, he wrote from the pit of his stomach about that ambiguous dominion that considers itself the South. All of his characters are hungry, desperate people. There’s been perhaps no one better at revealing the surreality of the American experience, particularly the rural one. And he should know. He nearly cooked himself as a kid after he fell into a vat meant for boiling dead hogs. He also married and divorced the same woman twice, which I guess is my way of trying to explain his writing ability to you?
Anyway, Crews' prose reads as if he hadn’t written it down, he would have died as the sort of local legend that some highway bar would still have his picture taped up on the mirror. But he did write, and simply put, he’s the real thing. Car might be the best place to start.
That’s where I did. Sara had a copy, of course. She is, among all else, a remarkable curator of things gathered. Things to keep. For all times.
As Karl pointed out, it is a short and brilliant book, which I’m remembering now I think because I had thought about Lotito out there on the interstate, working though the mess. Turns out that driving snow is great stuff for getting out the mind’s way and letting it roam. At great risk to the rest of your being, of course, but I’ve found that’s generally the case.
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There’s this recurring feeling when driving snow, or shortly thereafter, when you pass a vehicle that has succumbed to the weather, and you are still moving. It’s something way down deep in that twisting helix that makes you think: “YOU DUMB ASS.” Especially at meathead lift kit trucks that look silly and extra small enveloped with snow.
It could be called pride. A really, really stupid kind of pride. The worst kind.
I’d prefer to swallow that all down and forget it forever, but I imagine it’s a little bit like swallowing a spark plug. Or a bumper saddled with a sticker of Calvin peeing on pretty much anything.
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Later that day, I finished Stephen King’s The Stand. It’s taken a couple of months to read, as it’s the “Zach Snyder Cut”, which clocks in at a brain-numbing 1,439 pages.
I read it out of duty to a friend who said it is among her favorites. Also because I found a spot in my notebook that just says his name, Stephen King, and I'd like to know what that note was about. I have read plenty of King’s novels before, and generally followed the rule: a few weeks to read the first third, a couple days to finish the second, mere hours to finish the rest. I disagree that this is his best, but it is King at his most ambitious. And prophetic.
After a pandemic that destroys nearly all of humanity, it is the cars abandoned along the highways that pose the most menace. It's comforting to know that even in a spiritual apocalypse, the traffic’s even worse. And driving when it's snowing? Forget about it. This book contains the demon Legion itself, and still the snowy road home holds all the menace at the story’s pinnacle.
It took finishing The Stand to finally realize that those TRAVEL NOT ADVISED signs were meant for me.
You dumb ass.
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Towards the end of the week, I got this text message from the friend who’d taught me about the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, then asked about spinach totals: "Forget fiction. What you need to write is the definitive manual on driving through the snow."
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On the last drive in, I heard this song on the unrivaled lodestone that is the "Blues Before Sunrise" radio program. When driving snow, classical music is best to careen around with. But every Sunday, from midnight to 5 A.M. on public radio, Steve Cushing should always be your guide.
Because I had my phone in my innermost pocket, beneath pants and overalls and other snow gear for that inevitable crash, I had to repeat the name Arthur Prysock for multiple miles until I could write it down.
“Arthur Prysock, Arthur Prysock, Arthur Prysock…” I said, staring at buried cars, partially snow blind.
This song was a real "chance for brightness" for me, as another friend on my shift says. I've met the best humans in this life spent working strange hours and stocking shelves. Not all of them, but most of them. Stardust, I tell you.
If I hadn't heard it then, then you probably wouldn't have heard this version now. Maybe ever. I would consider that an anti-frequency illusion: the one you don’t know about, broadcast out on the airwaves while you were rightly sleeping and others were driving snow for…reasons.
The song is eerie and sort of creepy and required listening for this type of driving snow. That or maybe “Arthur Prysock” should be the universal mantra when driving snow. That’s probably it.
Try it out for yourselves, because next time, I’m calling out.
I know. Isn't that strange? I had to scroll down to the user reviews to find Karl's apt description.
Here's a NYT review from 1972, if you want to go straight to the source:
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/02/27/archives/car-by-harry-crews-152-pp-new-york-william-morrow-co-595.html
Because of this post, I clicked Want to Read on ‘Car’. For some reason the only description of the book was in French.