I got this call from one of my bosses one morning, basically just to tell me that the I-10 freeway was backed up and to try to leave a little bit earlier. Knowing I have like an hour-long commute he figured to do me a solid. Instead of getting in my car to start my drive at a little after 10:00 in the A.M., I hit the road around 9:45. I didn’t make it to work until 2:30 in the afternoon, so it didn’t end up mattering whether or not I left a whole 15 minutes early.
It was May 14th, 2023. I remember that day for all sorts of reasons — most notably that: by far the longest it has ever taken me on either side of my drive to (or from) work. In a hilarious fashion all the electronic Cal-Trans signs, the large black screens on the side of the freeway with the yellow writing to give drivers certain pertinent news, whether there’s an accident off of such and such street and to expect delays, or to remind them to share the road with motorcycles, or if they have nothing else, simply tell people not to drink and drive, read: ALL FOUR LANES CLOSED NEAR MORONGO / USE ALT ROUTE.
What’s funny about that, especially operating under the assumption that you, the reader, have no idea where or what Morongo is, is that there is no alternate route. There is just a freeway with four lanes. There is one way in and one way out. Some fucking Tesla driver decided to be on autopilot that morning and the stupid thing crashed into another vehicle and like three people died and another three people had to get airlifted to the hospital. Good job by you, Elon Musk.
My Apple maps were drunk that day, fluctuating between telling me I’d make it to work by 12:30 and other times saying it wouldn’t be until 4:00. I made an attempt to get really fucking slick and take one of the side roads, but apparently like 100,000 other cars had the exact same inclination or inkling towards such a slickness and it turned into a situation where I was moving like 10 feet per hour. Something like 14 different streets in the greater Cabazon area converged into one narrow strip that ultimately led to the only lane that cars could pass through to get to a two-lane street which inevitably led, like five miles down the road, into the on-ramp of the I-10 freeway.
It was a miserable time. People literally got out of their cars and walked a half-mile up the road to pick up snacks at one of the local convenience stores. Some walked to and from with those little red plastic gas cans to transport fuel back to their cars and trucks. Some who were driving cars that didn’t feel like waiting inconveniently in line tried to cut everyone, only to be turned back because so many other people had already been assholes doing the same thing and it was blocking the road. Everything was blocked. The best part, I think, was that local residents walked alongside the stopped cars selling bottles of water for $5 apiece and various fruits like strawberries and bananas because capitalism is always most alive, as a living, breathing organism, during the hard times.
Sitting in traffic there, on those side streets, really left me with nothing to do beyond observing how derelict that entire area is. There are no sidewalks. It’s either all county hick bullshit or unincorporated altogether. Yards and grass aren’t really a thing; I saw a bunch of half-thrown-together fences but it gets really windy over there so most of them were blown to hell, off-balance. One driveway had like three classic cars that were beaten down missing parts and out of commission. There was dirt everywhere. A woman pushed a stroller and a white guy wearing one of those straight-bill hats and an oversized T-shirt and long shorts with high socks and some stretchers in his ears tried to say something to her but she just kept walking. It all sounds kind of cliché, but there is a reason clichés exist. This was one hundred percent flyover country even though it’s in a fairly inhabited region of Southern California.
What is most present in my memory from that day is that it was the last day before I took a two-week hiatus from work for the first time in my life. I had a lot of time to think, that day, in my car. And I kept coming back to this weird idea that it was some kind of cosmic punishment. That I was being punished. Of all the days for something like that to happen — the longest commute from where I live in Riverside to where I work in Rancho Mirage — occurred on the one day before the only time I have ever taken an extended break from the casino. Not everything has to be about me, but that day felt like it was.
So I listened to The Killers. They had this album that I just kept playing, on repeat, called Pressure Machine. I have listened to a lot of The Killers over the course of my life. They are one of those bands that I usually give a couple weeks to every year. It might be a seasonal thing, it may be more emotional. I’m not sure and it doesn’t matter either way. But this album, this particular album, from 2021, hit different since it is so working class. Aside from all the bangers and all the songs that get me in my feels that they have made, this was the first that really made me think that they get it. Whatever it is.
And I shit you not, I listened to the entire fucking thing three times on my drive to work that day. Unironically they actually have a song on there called “The Getting By” on the deluxe version that they play five different times, in five different ways, and every one of them slaps. That is what that morning and early afternoon, for me, was all about. Just getting by. I’d argue that whole phase of my strange and fulfilling and simultaneously somewhat unfulfilling year has boiled down to. Just getting by.
I say all of this now because as much as I play songs from The Killers on this blog, it is a fact that a couple nights ago, September 21st, I went and saw them perform live at a casino that I once upon a time frequented. It was an amazing experience, as far as those things go. I don’t know what it is about 2023, but the band of my year and still, currently, the band of my existence is the same one that I was listening to on May 14th while I was stuck in the worst traffic I have ever experienced. I was listening to them that day, and if truth be told I haven’t gone more than a couple days or a couple drives without having them pouring through the speakers in my car via Spotify. I don’t really get it.
As far as the two weeks off went, they were definitely something. In the same way I feel sort of bad every time I call in sick, almost apologetically, even if I truly am sick, I encountered instant regret when like an hour and a half passed before I was told that, yes, instead of having only one week off, which you requested, we’re actually going to give you two. I didn’t know if I needed a day or a month or to just quit, but two weeks seemed like the perfect interval to catch me in the middle of That’s Too Much and That’s Not Going To Be Enough.
Sometimes you reach these phases where nothing is working and there is nothing left to do but try something that’s never been done. You are in a race to go nowhere but that specific nowhere is actually somewhere because it can be counted on and relied upon and there is comfort in what you know. You don’t have to answer to anybody but yourself and you can continue stashing money away and not having to care about anything beyond the next meal and the playground that reality presents itself as so much of the time. You don’t mind the nowhere.
But destiny doesn’t show who it is during the comforting and quieting moments. It only arrives while you are making your plans, when you are between two points: the one you are coming from, and the one you are going to. It slides in, in relative silence, destiny, that is, so subtly that you can’t even feel it while it’s happening. You go to sleep one night, and you wake up the next morning, not even knowing that it has already attached its tentacles like a vice grip around every fiber of your being that has ever mattered to you. And there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.
I mean, you can fight it. You always try to fight it. The problem with fighting an indestructible undefeated force such as destiny is that by the time you are aware that it has you, like really has you, by the throat, by the balls, by the heart and mind, by the soul, by the thoughts that you would rather not share, in your private moments, tucked away in bed, or walking down the halls of your workplace, through every facial expression you disguise by your smiles, every sentence you utter when the only words worth uttering are the ones you cannot say, because they mean too much to you, and you care too much about them, you are already well past the stage where it would make any sort of difference as far as destiny is concerned.
I have this condition where I tend to make everything as complex as it can possibly be while it’s happening, but whenever I look back on it I remember it in its simplest form. I take these four-course meals with all manner of ingredients and spices, consider how well they mesh, what it would look like if they were thrown together differently, and when I remember them I think, yeah, chicken. That tasted good.
Future Bets 
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