His mind was at it again, without defense. He didn't know where thoughts came from, whether they welled from some dark place in his subconscious, whether they were caused by chemicals that lurked in even darker recesses of his body. He could almost picture his liver making a hiccup and blurting a small stream of bile which eventually made its way to his brain, and coagulated there. End this, evade other things, disproportionate perspectives. If everything he knew about his condition was true, he had a disease of perception, meaning that he saw the world through a convex glass.

He knew he was no different from any man who ever walked the face of the planet... but some men knew their destiny without batting an eye. They never questioned it, some men never even looked into the glass of tomorrow. But, he had to wonder whether others had people around him, the females wanting to know what tomorrow would bring, or the next five years, the next three months and no sooner. Could we see each other together? How was he supposed to know in any respect? Just trying to make it through the day was the unanimous response, and it seemed always would be. It seemed. Like he could never make it past the end of the week. He'd plan to see shows. He'd plan vacations, but the filler... the filler was for the present...unfilled. You could color it in with crayons. He seldom made commitments ahead of time, because, well, you just never knew.

He remembered driving home from a friend's house during the late summer of 1994, the thought crossed his mind that he had the rest of his life yet to live, but nothing like what he had been through with 12 years of schooling would ever restrict him again. He could be who he wanted to be. But there was a sagging inward. Who else could he be but what he had always been? How could he proceed forward? How could he get Beyond... he didn't know, so when you don't know you start to think that the best option is to wait, wait until the answer finally came. Nothing about searching but waiting for the thing to just be placed into the plam of his hand. 15 years later, the philosophy hadn't totally changed. He'd been averted into believing that you had to reach out and take what you want to. Just don't be disappointed if it doesn't always yield. But he had to try. He had to put some mustard behind it.

So there's still an element of that befuddlement still in the way he thinks... he had a concept that worked for him for a while, a way of keeping his head about him, his wits... he imagines himself walking on the side of a country highway, the kind he was used to seeing in his early days visiting upstate New York. They wind around and get hidden by trees, but all that is of no consequence. Instead, it was the sensation of cars rushing by, the wind whipping in the back. See, the truth is that he has no more an idea of anything that's coming than anybody else. The smartest, most insightful people may be able to predict what will happen given a set of circumstances and maybe they can predict with some kind of accuracy, but they can't account for the right or wrong people showing up at the right or wrong time. You can never truly account for that and why would you? That would take all the pleasant surprises out of your life, and then you might as well perch on a wheel and start walking... So it is with watching the cars go by, you just have to let them go, without any warning, no matter which way you time the pattern, the cars just come by, but the only thing you can choose to do is watch them as they continue down the road... or not pay them any mind, just the red tail lights blend into the scenery and the sun continue to set and the cool breeze begin to pick up, the air dense, the crickets loud, the weeds rustling and the pines, and the pines....