Was on the phone the morning after we’d had dinner with our mothers. She’d left her purse in my mom’s car and I made a relatively predictable and innocuous remark about “that old trick…” playfully implying that she’d done it on purpose. She replied “Oh my God, what an ego!” with the kind of mild exasperation appropriate to that level of banter: a sort of verbal eye-rolling that would’ve seemed perfectly normal except that somehow it wasn’t. There was something about the way she said it - just the slightest blush of genuine embarrassment, probably undetectable to most but unmistakable to me - that somehow let me know she was mine. That was the beginning of what would be the happiest years of my life.
There’s a romantic notion that the end of things can be seen in their beginnings - that the seeds of death are present at the birth and that you can determine the way something will end by looking for clues hidden in its beginning. While I love this as a concept - as some metaphysical abstraction or literary device - it’s hard to believe that real life is quite that poetic. Although when a love affair and marriage is launched with a woman’s exasperated cry of “Oh my God what an ego!” it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how it’s going to end.
So with that in mind, let me tell you how the whole Freewayblogger thing started. I was driving back from the Bush V Gore protest, filled with the anger and frustration we all had (and described here) when I saw it: That Goddam Fucking Mattress. I’d been seeing it nearly every day for two weeks. This ugly, sodden, beat up mattress lying half on the roadway… And while I couldn’t do anything about the stolen election, the fact that protests were useless, some un-elected chuckleheaded Texan was about to be our President and that nobody seemed to give a damn, I sure as hell could do something about that fucking mattress. I pulled over, grabbed a can of black spray-paint, dragged the mattress off the roadway and painted “1776 - 2000” and “R.I.P.” like a crude tombstone, leaned it up against one of the palm trees, got back in my van and drove off. That was my first freeway sign, and it should’ve been my last.
Imagine the world and what it would be like if Sandra Day O’Conner had simply voted the other way. Bush v. Gore wouldn’t have stopped all the votes from being counted and Al Gore would’ve been President. George Bush and Dick Cheney would’ve still been the assholes they always were, but they’d have been assholes the other 7 billion of us could’ve ignored. The trillions wasted on wars in the Middle East would’ve gone into things like healthcare, education and sustainable energy so we’d be healthier and smarter with more solar panels, bike paths, Arctic ice and Amazon rainforest. September 11th would’ve still happened of course - right between Septembers 10 and 12 - just without all the airplanes flying into buildings and whatnot.
If Sandra Day O’Conner wasn’t such a partisan hack, if I’d skipped the protest, if the mattress hadn’t been there, if I hadn’t just bought that goddam spray paint or had brought it inside like I should have… Any one of those things would’ve saved me. If I hadn’t had to teach the next day I wouldn’t have made that most fatal of errors: returning to the scene of he crime. Or if one, just one of the thousands and thousands of hard-working patriotic San Diego Republicans that drove by had simply pulled over, walked 20 feet and knocked the damn thing over… then just about every minute of every day of my life since then would’ve gone entirely differently.
But none of them did, because 22 hours later I’m on my way to work and Jesus-Christ-I-Don’t-Believe-It-That-Goddam-Thing-Is-Still-There… it was sagging a bit, but still perfectly legible - and even uglier than I’d remembered. It was such an eyesore even Democrats would’ve wanted to get rid of it. Hell, even I wanted to knock it over.
And if only I had… If I’d just pulled over and knocked the goddam thing over, or if I’d just driven by and shrugged it all off… either would’ve been my salvation. When they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, let me tell you they’re goddam right. Because when I entered the ramp it was fully intending to pull over and knock the damn thing down. But then, just as the moment of truth arrived, with my foot hovering over the clutch, a voice in my head said “Don’t bother… somebody else will take care of it…” which at that critical moment turned out to be all the persuading I needed to just keep on going, and so I did.
Remember, I’d just spent the last two minutes waiting in line and marveling at how the mattress was still there - literally wondering why nobody had just pulled over and knocked the thing down - and still the voice saying surely someone would came in clear as a bell. Suddenly I understood perfectly how the mattress had survived: everybody drove by figuring the next guy would take care of it! And in one blinding, epiphanal flash I was shown not just the fact of human laziness, but the depth of it, the consistency, but most of all, the sheer potential! If something that slapdash, ugly and easy to take down could reach thousands of people on a ramp, imagine what was possible if you actually put some thought into it?
I know it doesn’t sound like much as far as life-changing moments go, but the person I was driving onto the freeway was fundamentally changed from the one who’d driven onto the ramp. Accelerating onto Interstate 8, with the sparkling blue waters of the Pacific behind me and all of America ahead, I envisioned a new, better form of protest. And christened with the words “Don’t bother, someone else will take care of it…” how could it possibly fail?