Sweet Home Alabama

Playing "Sweet Home Alabama" as the wheels kicked up the dirt and he changed gears. This was dust lands and gravel roads. The heat was intense, never letting them forget who was in charge. At 90 mph, the sand was the air behind them. At 90 mph, life was unimportant unless it was an american made engine.

There should of been a terrible earth quake, a nuclear explosion, hurricanes, the wrath of God. It would of made sense then, why he was in the middle of nowhere, moving in random lines. But the wrath of God was not the reason he was changing to 3rd gear, or why the deep brown leather back seats of the lincoln convertable were covered in dust. There was a bobble-head jesus looking out the back window. "Jesus got my back" he would tell people who asked about it.

Stopping by a clearing in the trees, he stepped out, leaving the door open and the engine running. The dust cloud slowly caught up to the car then settled around like it like a child tied to it's mom on a rope. He looked out over the country side and at the 4pm sun. Scattered back roads and small towns, capped by a hill line and then the orange sky. He knelt down and picked up some rocks, the white dust rubbing over his hands like talcum powder. The rocks were hot from baking in the sun. He shook them a few times, each one, before chucking them off to his side.

It was just one of those things that you were supposed to do, and did.

The smell of freedom is the smell of chlorine in a pool, was the thought of the moment. The sun was working real hard to get down, but even it was lazy in the summer heat. So the sun took it's good 'ol time dropping off and letting everyone cool down.

the longest dusk in the known history of man, was the next thought. That might be of actually been true. It really might of. He let himself think about chlorine again, and the red swimming trunks lil' Jane from the house next door yanked off him one afternoon when all the nighborhood kids were playing in the local pool.

Gas stations were air pockets, and at night, they were also beacons of light in an otherwise barren and dark landscape of a straight road, and trees looming over you. The stop at the gas station brought coffee with lots of cream and sugar, little debbies, three packs of chesterfields and a bottle of mouthwash. All of them, in some direct or off-logic way, were a way to stay awake. He put the coffee on the hood, the little debbies and the mouthwash on the passenger seat, took a cigarette out of one of the packs, and put them on the dashboard. Lighting a cigarette, he paused and looked across the road, asking himself; "why did the chicken cross the road?"