By U.V. Ray

I left the pump attendant filling her up. He walked flat-footed over to my car and his mouth gaped open as he shoved the nozzle in. He stood there like a goon, staring blankly at the digits clicking down on the display. It was an old faithful pump made in the 50’s and it stood there like a soldier to attention. The attendant struck me as a little slow-witted. It was true that if you pay peanuts, you get a monkey.

The toilet seat cover in the shit-house was down. Eventually, you catch something and die. Be it cancer, heart disease, syphilis or Christ knows what else. You catch such diseases in filthy roadside toilets like these, I told myself, and live on only through your progeny. I tore off some tissue and used it to lift the soiled seat. I stood waiting to piss. If I used my cock for anything more than pissing these days it would be a miracle. When I finally pegged it, it was curtains. There were no children to carry on my genome. I would simply vanish. My whole life would be nothing more than polished surfaces. A superficial aesthetic of no deeper consequence or achievement. And then it would end. Abruptly and finally, just like that. It’s enough to make you laugh.

It’s remarkable how such revelations come to us while we’re in the bathroom.

There is a time when you are young and everything is burning bright. Everything is happening and you are at the beginning of the adventure, brimming with endless possibilities. Love and loss are yet to come to you and you are as yet untouched by life’s failures. But everything fades away in the end. Like a spring flower exploding in colour and then all too soon withering away, everything always comes down to the lowest common denominator eventually. We are surrounded by failure. Everything comes and goes. Even the sun and probably, in time, even the whole universe. This is how delicate we really are. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel, don’t let anyone ever tell you there is. There is finally only the looming spectre of death.

There are sensations in this world that I will never experience, no matter how long, wide and extensive my search. Landscapes I will never cross, seas I will never sail, children I will never raise. There are things that are beyond the limits of my psychology; things that are beyond my capacity to comprehend or even begin to think about. And this notion made me feel small and insignificant, filled me with a sense of futility. I was 44 years old and finishing my piss and flushing was the closest I’d come to feeling a sense of satisfaction in life. That was about the fucking size of it. And even now, right at this moment, a fish turns and twists, flickering like a gold coin in the steel carcass of some ship wreck somewhere at the bottom of an ocean. It’s all so meaningless. This whole immense planet, by and large, is indifferent to every one of us.

It would be nice to be like the pump attendant, with brain cells frazzled from years of the breathing in of petrol fumes; gloriously oblivious to the machinations of the universe around him. As sure as shit, there in his fully encapsulated splendour stood the epitome of a life given to ignorant bliss. The pinnacle of human happiness. The human race had really come on in leaps and bounds. We started off putting men on the moon – and now we have McDonalds and daytime TV chat shows as sustenance for the unthinking masses. While all the time they sit and wait for further advancements in eternal life technology. They await their eternity of purposelessness. It’s a fact, even if they were handed eternity on a plate the great unwashed would still do fuck-all with their lives. Truly, this is an age when any man who has his own thoughts and ideas will be labelled an enemy of the human race.

“Weather report sez there’s gwaan be a storm comin.’” The monkey raised his arm and pointed languidly towards the dark clouds gathering on the mountainous horizon.

All these hotels and motels and diners and gas stations started to look the same after a while. “Yeah,” I nodded as I paid old Wiseblood for the fuel and watched him plod back to his little kiosk, the smell of petrol and dirt seeping out of his every pore.

I’d done a couple of grams of speed. I jumped back in the car, slammed it into gear and hit he road again, watching clouds of dust kick up in my rear view mirror.