The Value of Gasoline

I think this must be a pre-digital shot. This sky is so turquoise. I can't imagine that it was really that color when I shot this.
I think I was out looking for Quonset Huts.
Just a ride somewhere, anywhere.

Every time I think now of going for a ride to "clear the cobwebs in my mind", I think twice, three times.
Cha ching, cha ching.
I guess it is a good thing. I can't just run from myself anymore...I have to sit still and stew.

Keeping up an automobile and supplying it with energy is just about a full time job in and of itself. Part of the motivation that has delivered me to this place in my "work" was the fact that a good third of any energy I was expending was going straight to the transportation to just get to the job and back. And of course, I was an outside salesperson. Lots of wear and tear and the companies were getting squinchier and squinchier. (That's my new word: Tight, greedy, profit driven, anti-kind, anti-nice, anti-people centered.)

I'm trying to dis-enslave myself from all of the energy zappers I can so that more and more of my life can be filtered through more or less rose colored glasses instead of dread.

I can't think of a job I have had in my life that I truly looked forward to going to. There were certainly things I enjoyed. Things that made me feel purposeful. People I liked being with. But, sadly, I truly cannot think of a single one that I actually couldn't wait to get to.

Diggin in the dirt. That is the best thing. Listening to the birds and diggin in the dirt.
And driving. But that has just about become a true luxury; in every sense.

I did love my drives. I still do. Whenever anxiety wells up in me, a driving force overwhelms me to get in the car and go somewhere, anywhere. Sometimes even going the three offramps of our town and back is enough. Just forward motion and pretty scenery. "That'll do Pig."

This was through the windshield of my little truck going out the 60 in California toward Beaumont, Banning, Palm Springs, many years ago now. As a matter of fact, this is the very same road my drivers ed teacher asked me "where the fire was?"

He called me Celery and I thought it was because he thought I had a vegetable for brains. I think he just couldn't remember my name. There were three of us in the car with him. I was scared for sure when the others were driving, but fearless when I was. He made us back up in the school parking lot for near two days, doing figure eights, before he would let us drive forward. Then we were unleashed on these long, long drives through the then rather remote freeway north of our school. Sometimes we would get on the same parallel back road that ran the same distance but all along the railroad track, farther down in the valley.

All of my life, I have used driving to curb anxiety. Like putting a restless baby to sleep.

For so many years I have thought I had forever. Forever to make more money, forever to make up what I spent on things I really didn't need. I've always thought a meal out or more clothes than I needed was nothing to be alarmed about. There would always be more.

Who in the working class knew that it would get as hard as this.
Again though, having to sit still and stew, having to think twice, three times, having to wait, having to weigh and measure every nickel spent, isn't all bad..

It has made me study politics, seek out brilliant minds, listen more to wisdom and care about others more.

It has made me more cognizant of the preciousness of life and time and of valuing the simplest of things.
Like birds and bees and diggin in the dirt. Like Little Red-Haired Girl and Orphan Annie making sufficient if not preferred company. Spending more time at Church. Carpooling.

Most of all, it has brought me to the place of realizing just how necessary it is to be able to conjure up your own way of creating wealth, and that isn't just about money.

This picture is a scanned copy of an illustration in one of my mother's childhood "Atlantic Readers", the book dating 1921. I can't find copyright info.

Good thing I like my own company. It's all I've got sometimes.
Marbles found...
"The fish are the last to see the water."