I really don’t want to face reality this week. I confess I want to hide away and pretend it’s not happening. I cast my vote; now I’d prefer to crawl into a cave, or drive off somewhere with no signal and no bars.
Voting this year feels like the free-floating angst that comes after a blood test and before the results. It feels like when you’re watching that horror movie scene where the hapless girl ventures into the cellar alone at midnight to investigate a bump in the night. Will it be the compliant cat or a demon from Hell?
It feels exactly like that heightened caution you get standing on the heavily sloped roof of a three-story house with crumbling composite shingles where you need to cross over to the sunny side to retrieve the kids’ Frisbee hung up in the gutter.
It feels like when you accidentally cut someone off on the highway and they pull up behind you and honk their horn and flash their lights and shake their fist at you through your rearview mirror, and then a mile later they follow you down the off-ramp, and you’re not white.
It feels like when you walk into a closed sliding glass door fast and get seriously slammed and try your best to walk it off, but wake up with your neck and back aching and stiff and wonder if you’ve done permanent damage to yourself.
It feels like that worry that comes when you’re driving home from the hospital after getting 20 x-rays to see if you injured yourself walking into a sliding glass door and wonder if you were actually OK but just exposed yourself to cancer-causing radiation that may come back to haunt you down the road. While driving distracted, you run a red light with a camera on top and figure that by Tuesday you’ll receive a hefty ticket in the mail.
It feels like when you are sitting down at a restaurant alone finishing a delicious meal and realize you don’t have your car keys so you rush to the counter to pay your tab and hurry out to the parking lot to see if your car is still there and suddenly notice as you are pacing the aisles because you forgot exactly where you parked your car that you no longer have your wallet or your cell phone.
It’s like that feeling you get when you unexpectedly bump into an old friend at the mall and stop to greet and say hello and then look down and your 5-year-old child is missing.
It’s like that feeling you get when you are driving over the Sierra Nevada Mountains during a winter blizzard on US Route 50 headed to its terminus in Ocean City, Md., or maybe Tahoe, and your low-on-gas light begins to glow orange and stays on. Then traffic stops because someone slid out up ahead. You turn off the engine to save gas and your windows fog up. The children in the back seat begin to cry. Your wife begins nagging you for forgetting to fuel up in Placerville like she suggested and your teenage son says, “I told you we should have stopped at In-N-Out for burgers. I’m starving.”
As you look through the glass at the endless line of cars in front of you and behind you, and beside you because the westbound lane is also stopped up because someone slid out up ahead, you come eye-to-eyes, through the blanched flurry of onion flakes tumbling down, with a peapod of windows in a bus full of grumpy senior citizens, all of whom with a driver-side window seat are staring directly back at you, and you realize you have to pee.
For some it feels exactly like when you’re driving in unknown territory at sunset eager to get somewhere 100 miles off on a windy two-lane road and begin looking for a shortcut, a more direct route to your destination.
On a particularly sharp hairpin turn that actually points you in the opposite direction temporarily, you spy a side road at a T-Bone steak intersection where an orange billboard covered with scantily clad women points off the main road to a straight side road and reads, “Everyone’s destination is only ten miles this way” followed by a flashy blinking arrow, and a beautifully paved one-way yellow-brick road lined in golden guardrails stamped “Made in USA prisons” and streetlight chandeliers to lead the way, and the temptation is too strong.
Impatience gets the best of you and you make that alternate right turn. You follow it on a gentle upward slope, toward the sun, with flowering trees all around you.
Then you come to the crest of the craggy hill and the road begins a steep descent. It meanders in vicious switchbacks down the back slope of the jagged ridge. Your brakes reek and smoke as you pump them rounding the dozens of hairpin turns that take you in all directions.
At the bottom of the cliff the road ends at an enormous parking lot full of people standing around outside their cars, scratching their heads. At the far end of the weed-pocked lot sits an abandoned casino with a drooping, empty message board. Its bulbs are broken. The chip trays are empty. The owners are gone.
Steve Gibbs is a retired Benicia High School teacher who has written a column for The Herald since 1985.

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