Jack

Jack drove truck.

More specifically, he drove a semi trailer filled with trash (other people's trash, mostly) up and down the grey veins snaking spider-webbed across northern California. Over the mounting years (growing ever past his own expectations when he had initially, with reluctance, taken the job), the tires of his Freightliner had greased a triangle plotted between the floating trash barge dock, the cadmium & heavy metals reclamation compound and, biweekly, the durable electronic recycling center (which gave the warm fuzzies to a growing lazily-conscientious population, allowing them to believe they were still doing their small part by considerately disposing of their aged computer monitor when in fact they were dropping a mercury grenade off at a depot to be shipped to China and burned in a putrid battleground stretching farther than the eye could see by a sinewy man with no fingertips or sense of smell wearing a tank-top) run by people who held their bottom lines above tired ideals.

This was not being put past Jack. He had recognized his instrumentally insignificant role in this grand irony of the garbage wheel. His personal feelings seemed in constant bloom as if agitated by the vibrations knobby tires sent shuddering through his cab. Guilt followed resignation followed resolve. Occasionally his stomach would churn on the greasy reminders of his place in the big trash dance. Other times he would shrug and think about the line of people who would take his place without remorse.

No matter his feelings, no matter the particular day or specific circumstance which brokered their encounter, the people who shared his highways had to make peace with their past as it thundered towering and overflowing overtaking them in the fast lane. Children would gape at the peaks of disposable diapers capping refuse mountains like snow. Adults would ignore the jetsam which wiggled free from the mound and skidded into the ditch, ignored. He captained a ghost ship filled with the bygone, from tiny insignificant moments to entirely encompassing histories, coffee filters to last testaments, jettisoned once and now filling the rear-view like filthy memories.

Once, on a particularly introspective and dejected evening, fueled and demoralized by spirits of liquid and haunt, he was labeled in permanent inks across his right foot "Filthy Pilot." He pictured his toes as the anchor sinking all those yesterdays, miring things best forgotten, himself being absorbed with them tangled in wedding tapes and tampon strings. They gently pressed 16,000 pounds of history into the earth.

During the first few weeks he found it fascinating what people would discard. The parking spot reserved for him in the covered carport adjacent to his apartment complex was barricaded with good intentions pulled from his early loads: furniture that appeared to be antique only in need of refinishing and upholstery, electronic gadgets that might be tinkered or easily repaired, wrecked bicycles and lawnmowers whose gears would surely be salvageable. But those were the early days, before he became jaded and complacent. He had no use for other people's trash anymore.

That is, until he found the envelope of money.

8 cups of coffee, 4 sentences

So, being that my wife was out this morning on an errand, that being picking up her mother from the airport in Portland—slightly over 100 miles away—and being that the single and solitary driving force behind my leaving the warm folds of my blankets in the morning is the cheerful percolation of rapidly heated water through grounds of coffee within our electric chrome carafe, and being that I was alone (as my wife was out as I have previously mentioned) and my faberware plug-in coffee brewer makes 8 cups of coffee (although the nature of their measurement is dubious at best, seeing as no mug is that small) so being all these things, a very large amount of coffee was ingested by myself this morning, alone and in rapid succession downed diluted with vanilla soy creamer as I attempted to comply with my spouse's wish that I clean the sinks and counter tops and vacuum during her absence in an attempt to make our humble home slightly less unsightly to her mother whom she was off in Portland retrieving from the airport causing the lonely caffeine bender during which I was now in the midst of and having trouble focusing on the task at hand.

So, after writing part of an e-mail and replacing the toilet-paper roll and filling the dish washing tub and watching the dog urinate, I answered the phone to a robotic voice reminding me to pick up a reserved book and return an over-due DVD which I hadn't yet watched, causing me to panic and abandon my growing number of half-completed tasks and rush off down the sidewalk in one sock and my PJ top which happens to be a sweatshirt with Homer Simpson reading "Springfield Unathletic Department", slopping now cooling coffee out of a Scooby Doo mug as I huffed past the St. Mary's Catholic church and the rather large lurking man who muttered something very strange as I passed.

"I am a very dangerous man," he said with a low and menacing tone which would normally compel me to quicken my pace and makes it even more bizarre that after 8 cups of coffee my reaction would be to slow and stop and turn to say, "We are all dangerous, given the right circumstances or tools," as I glanced around to point out a man who scurried along across the street carrying a sign of indecipherable deduction and said, "That man's sign might be a dangerous statement, sending some deranged psychopath into a spiral of degraded behavior like the Beatles did to Charlie Manson," even though I had no idea how the sign read, although I believed that I had seen the word 'Corinthians' along the bottom.

So the menacer loomed and the sign-holder caught interest and approached and I came up with numerous other examples of how everyone is dangerous, such as drunk drivers and people digging holes without calling the natural gas company, and as the sign came closer it became clear that it was nothing but jumbles of letters and gibberish scrawled in big messy capital letters on the flattened inside of a produce box, and the strikingly twisted facial features of the sign-wielder became more pronounced and vivid and I pointed at him and shouted at the menacer, "THAT is a dangerous man, sir!" unable to control my own vim, but the menacer only shrugged, and the sign-holder continued right past us as if we were invisible, and I swapped items at the library to hurry home and use the bathroom, being that I had many cups of coffee this morning.