Proud to be an . . .

It's an old F150.

The driver, 100 pounds overweight, in an old sweatshirt with the sleeves ripped off. His left arm straight, wrist draped over the stirring wheel with rolls of flesh under a pale, sweaty armpit. He thinks he looks like the father on "American Chopper." His right arm is stretched out across the seat back as if practicing for the day a woman might actually be drunk enough to ride there. A spit cup dangling loosely from his fingers.

Long hair combed back in honor of The King, but not a bit of movement in the wind. A four day growth of stubble forms a patchwork on his cheeks and chin.

He's doing sixty in a forty mile an hour zone, and runs a red light thinking, "shit, it was just pink." If a car gets in front of him he rides their bumper until they get out of the way, and he gives them the finger as he passes. "Get off the road, bitch. If you were my woman you'd learn to get out of the way."

On each side of his back window is a Confederate flag, and in the middle a sticker of Calvin pissing on a Chevrolet emblem. And on each side of his bumper is a decal of the American flag and the slogan, "Proud to be an American."

Is America proud he is?

いわし雲記憶は遠きことに馳せ
The mackerel sky I think of the world Of long ago.
—Kyouhou

It's a thousand pages give or take a few . . .4番

Now Thomas—please try to keep T.D.M. in mind. He is, after all, one of the central elements of this story, if not, as some would have it, life itself. As I was saying, Thomas was under the weather, and on this particular day it was not weather he particularly wanted to be under. It was one of those marrow freezing, soul draining early spring rains you get in the Mid-West who's only redeeming feature is that it makes the first line of "The Wasteland" seem like an understatement. When the local PBS station broadcast a work by Mahler that afternoon the suicide hotline had to bring in extra help. The world was cold, wet and gray, and not only was Thomas being rained on, he felt like hell.