the volunteer state

(originally posted 10/15/2017)

Sometimes I think the radio should come with a warning. Perhaps a small bulletin that comes on every time you start the car simply stating once the music begins there exists a possibility that a particular song will come on that will take you back to a moment in time that you may or may not want to remember. I’m sure everyone would ignore it, much like the warning on the side of a pack of cigarettes, but if it could save just one person from hearing a song that hurls them lengthwise into some unwanted memory then perhaps it would be money well spent.

So it was with me this very evening. Innocently driving along, minding my own beeswax, I’m sure you didn’t know I owned my own beeswax business, when on comes a song that reminds me of a long-forgotten summer. Obviously you might be surprised to learn about the beeswax business but at the same time it can’t surprise you that I don’t earn my living from writing. In fact, the only obvious thing is that there must be good money to be made in beeswax for me to continue putting out books that nobody on the planet wants to read. One could argue that the bees are nature’s little enablers.

I don’t want you to the idea that when the song came on it hit me so violently that I was startled and swerved dangerously and all the beeswax in my car suddenly went flying covering the interior with the aforementioned. Not at all. It took a little while for the music to whisk me away to that summer long ago.

The summer I sold books door to door. In Tennessee. Actually a more accurate description would be the summer I tried to sell books door to door in Tennessee. Now I think about it, it was actually great training for not selling books later in my life … but as I’ve just thought about it like that I’ll let it go lest I risk grinding the entire tale to a halt. That assumes that this story was ever really moving forward in the first place. One could argue that is started at a halt and has just sat there from the opening paragraph.

Anyway, they corralled a bunch of us college kids looking for summer work and drove us down to Tennessee and separated us into two groups; the girls and the boys. The girls they dropped off in affluent neighborhoods each morning where people had money to buy books and could actually read and the boys were delivered to demilitarized zones where everyone was always home and looking to throw things at and berate college kids trying to sell books door to door. Once the sun set in these parts of town we would have been murdered and our skulls made into ashtrays if the van would have been so much as five minutes late.

On the weekends I would drive up to the mountains with my best friend at the time and we’d listen to the radio and watch the sun set on the hood of his car. One song in particular, you know how these Top 40 stations are. They play a few songs over and over and there’s always one that seems to be on an endless loop.

That was the song I heard tonight. And I was back on the hood of the car. And I drove and spent tortured minutes trying to remember the guys name. My best friend at the time. The guy I spent every waking moment with for two months in the bowels of Tennessee enduring the heat and the rejection of America’s Least Educated day in and day out and now I couldn’t even remember his name. I kept thinking to myself what a dogshit person I must be. And how people come in and out of your life and then they disappear like they never existed. Like I was never in Tennessee at all.

Then I realized how gay the song was. So gay. If I told you the song you’d probably assume we spent most of the time on the hood of the car fucking each other and how the hood was soaked with our cum and we’d keep sliding off due to the excessive amount of jizz on it. This one song would have you imaging all of the guys waking up each morning in Tennessee and having sex on the floor of the house we were staying at and in the shower and in the kitchen and finally the homeowners asking us all to leave because of the staggering amount of semen covering every square inch of our living area due to the all blowing of loads that went on 24/7

So to recap, the first half of the song I was trying to remember this guy’s name and the second half I was laughing at how gay the song was.

The name of the song?

None of your beeswax.