driving_range werewolf only twenty, but he's driving around alone at 10 p.m on a saturday, like a 41 one year old trying to forget their home. checking out high school age girls near bowling alleys and dance clubs, their smiles bright and distant like the foretold deaths of stars, very still to him, unaffected by his motions enough to make constellations with. the music's loud, it's a song he's never heard before, but he still feels like he's the only person who's really alive. passes a cop who's throwing a cigarette out the window. wants to start a high speed chase and die in it. instead he'll go home and watch it at least once or twice on every channel, with actors, who make him feel so inadequate that all he can do is keep coming back, showing him his capture and his escape. he feels like he could be the cop. feels like he could be the teenage girl. starts counting the moths he sucks into his truck's grill. loses count. starts over. turns off the music. silence. parks in the near empty parking lot of a mall. there's a denny's nearby. really just workers there serving other workers there who just got off their shift. eating at an ihops makes him feel powerful. the waiter or waitress smiles because of them. sometimes they're really attractive, just down on their luck he guesses. he lights a cigarette, wishes he had some pot. opens the car door, his legs feel heavy swinging down to the ground as if pulled by two earths. the one he lives in and the one he doesn't. the area is suburban enough for the stars to be bright, but bustling enough for the streetlights to pick up where the stars leave off. all around him are little points of light like so many dots on the map. and even when you spin the globe and place your finger down and go there, the view's barely changed. from a nearby park he hears the delighted scream of a girl, rowdy laughter of boys. laughter that wants to be heard. laughter that wants to clear any darkness around it like some primevil fire. he looks up at the stars again. orion's belt, orion's big dipper, orion's sky. the little dipper made out of blue stars. there's a bear there somewhere but he can't find it. maybe that's what seperates him from those people laughing and screaming. he sidesteps to the left, the stars seem to shift for a moment, but then they are back where they were before. his truck has moved. he can't get around them with his eyes. he'll never be able to. he takes a deep breath of smoke. the smoke dissipates into the air. he wonders what it'd be like to be able to see the stars move. not the cheap trick of a shooting star, but move because you moved. his palms are sweaty, the air is cold, it produces a paradox sensation, alternating between hot and cold, always one or the other and never both. trucks and cars make hollow hisses on an overpass nearby. racoons live their whole lives in the makeshed parks around the mall, in the dumpsters and the shadows and he never sees one untill looking in the rear view mirror after another thud. pictures it in his head. "that was an awfully big moth." laughs to himself softly, a kind of crinkling. the sound people make when they're trying to do something slowly and subtly to avoid attention, like opening a bag of chips during a movie or in class, but end up bringing more attention to themselves than an unapologetic tear ever could've. the type of laughter you make around babies when they're sleeping. it was not the type of laughter he heard from the park. that was the laugh you wean babies on if you want them to grow up right. that was the laugh they gave moses and cleopatra in those old movies which wavered and crackled like a mirage and felt more comfortably distant than movies today, which show you what it feels like to look out of your own eyes, as if they didn't realize that you were paying to ignore that little problem. put out his cigarettes, sidestepped to the right this time, trying one more time to catch the stars off guard. no such luck. if only i had some pot he thought. he raised his hands triumphantly into the sky and blocked out the moon. it was waxing not waning, forming a mishapen d in the sky. sometimes alone he felt like there was nothing that could be imagined that he hadn't imagined, that he was in all senses a genius. that the only thing that stopped him was fatigue, was inertia. he just couldn't get a clean start, there was just too much he meant in each word that wasn't conveyed. he thought he'd go home and call his friends, or call his girlfriend. he just wanted for a moment to know what it's like to not pretend. but he knew he would pretend, without even thinking about it or planning it. he wasn't a star, and everytime she sidestepped he felt his insides churn, his words shrink back to the average, the safest bet. nothing could be risked, and his screams were muted to sighs. and forget the escapes or the crashes of love, he'd let actors handle those for him too. because what have they got riding on the line? how real is it to them? those nights of a light's soft glow, skin suddenly revealed as touchable, as if the sky could suddenly be swam in. the tenderness, the soft laughter now brave, a nativity scene experienced as the babe, as the father, as the virgin. yet sometimes he felt like it was not what he was meant to do. he was meant to move stars, but he was born into the wrong earth. he again felt the other earth's gravity. he wanted to drive by another cop, he wanted that high speed chase. he'd see them in the rear view mirror, with the same curiosity he eyed the mishapen racoon, calling over their dispatch, "we've got a huge moth running amuck on highway one, i'm gonna need backup." and he'd backup and throw the car in reverse, watch the future float into the past. and when he screamed, it'd be sickening. beginning emergency techinicians some just out of high school where they didn't appreciate enough their high school age girlfriends would puke on the scene and say to each other, "this isn't like in the movies." his friends would cry at his funeral, and he'd lie there in the ground unmoved. but now he's back in the car, driving at a safe enough speed, but fast enough to feel like there's a point. these glimmers of potential will pass. there'll be nights where the laughter is thick as frosting and as boisterous as cake. the lonliness will never be too much. he can always sit in his car if the parking lot feels too big. the next birthday could always solve it all, he can't disprove that anymore than he can move the stars with a sidestep. and at least when he's 41 he'll fit right. he drives home in silence, and the silence feels like truth, feels like skin. there isn't a person he wouldn't lie to if they'd let him feel the truth in their skin and their kisses, like car crashes, like birthdays in advance, like constellations you can spin around and almost forget about. 021102 ... cowboy-child i shore do dislike golf 021102 what's it to you? who go blather from