the long dumb road — a route i have been driving without a license

there is a road i have been driving without a license, and the license is competence. the long dumb road runs through bulk membership warehouses and ends at a kitchen i no longer trust. i have been on it longer than i would care to confirm in writing.

writing this on a wednesday morning, 2:18pm, from the chair the company would prefer i used differently. the spreadsheet is open in another tab. i have, by my own estimate, the rest of the morning before anyone notices.

so. the long dumb road. i did not name it. i looked up at it, one monday, somewhere between a 24-pack of paper towels and a drawer of unopened envelopes, and the name was already painted on the asphalt. you do not name your own roads. the road names itself, and you find out which one you are on by looking at the exits.

the long dumb road: a personal, unpaved metaphor for the route a man takes when he keeps choosing the small bad option in front of him over the slightly less small bad option just behind it. it is, by definition, longer than a smarter route, and dumber than a wiser one. in my case, it is the only one i have a key to.

THE LONG DUMB ROAD. NO MAP. NO EXITS. ONE LANE.

where this road begins (a kitchen, a snooze, a bowl)

the long dumb road begins, for me, at 6:51am, in a kitchen i no longer respect. it begins with a 9-min snooze, then another 9-min snooze, then a third 9-min snooze that i have agreed not to count out loud. by the time my feet touch the floor, three exits have already gone past and i did not pick any of them on purpose.

i hit the snooze the way other men hit the gym. with conviction. with rhythm. nine minutes is not rest. nine minutes is a small, anxious nap with a guilt timer attached. i wake up worse than i went down, and i do this three times in a row, every weekday. that is, if my arithmetic still works on a wednesday, twenty-seven minutes of pre-failure before breakfast.

nobody plans this kind of route. you build it nine minutes at a time.

the bulk membership exit (a man who lives alone walks in)

two miles down the long dumb road, on the right, is the bulk place. concrete floor, cathedral ceiling, free samples on a monday. i have a bulk membership. i live alone. i would like you to sit with that for a moment, because i am sitting with it now and it is not getting easier.

i go on the weekend. i emerge with a 24-pack of toilet paper. it is for one person. one. it will outlive a relationship i am not currently in, and possibly a microwave i have not yet killed. i carry it up four flights because the elevator in my building remembers things. i could buy four rolls. i could buy eight. i buy twenty-four because there is, somewhere in my head, a quiet voice that says this is the move a serious adult would make. the voice is wrong. the voice is, on this stretch of road, the only one with a driver’s license.

this is the irony i live in: a single man stockpiling household paper goods like a small uncertain country preparing for a siege that is not coming. the membership pays for itself, my brain insists. i renewed it last march. there was nobody to negotiate with.

what this road shares with a road movie (the 1994 one)

i was thinking about this last night while watching, for reasons i cannot explain on company time, the 1994 road movie about two men driving a small dog-shaped van across the country. that film is, structurally, a long dumb road. two men, one car, a series of decisions each more confidently bad than the last, and somewhere in the middle a moment where they pause, look at the map, and choose, on principle, to go the wrong way.

what i recognized was the cadence. not the jokes. the cadence. the way one bad choice generates a slightly worse choice which then generates a smaller, sadder, more confident bad choice. you do not arrive at the bulk warehouse by accident. you arrive after twenty-eight smaller steps, each of which felt, in the moment, like a reasonable thing to do on a saturday.

i think about the dumb diary i keep, technically, which is the running log of these cadences. it is more of a pile than a diary. the pile is what passes for an archive on this stretch.

the hot take stretch (water, and other lies)

now, here is the thing. somewhere along the long dumb road there is a stretch where you start defending your choices in writing, to no one, on company time. i am on that stretch right now.

the water lie is, in miniature, the long dumb road itself. somebody confidently sold us a thing. we bought it. we kept buying it. nobody stopped to ask if the thing was even the thing. that is the architecture of the road.

a brief detour (the wine, the vest, the nodding)

i once spent forty dollars on a wine tasting where stefan, wearing what appeared to be a sommelier costume his wife had ordered, declared a glass of red had “notes of leather, tobacco, and forest floor”. i nodded. i sniffed. i bought a bottle on the way out because saying no felt, at the moment, like a longer conversation than i had energy for. the bottle was a small paid stretch of the road. nobody built it for me. they just showed me which exit, and i took it.

how this road ends (it does not, but we can pretend)

so what is the off-ramp, asks the reader who has scrolled this far on company time of their own. honest answer: i do not know. i have been on this road for, by some estimates, my entire adult life. no exit signs in years.

i suspect the off-ramp is small, unmarked, and made entirely of saying no, on a wednesday, to one bulk-sized purchase. i suspect it involves not hitting the 9-min snooze for the third time, which would, in itself, restore nine minutes a day to a working adult. nine minutes a day is forty-five minutes a week is roughly thirty-nine hours a year. i did the arithmetic just now. it took me approximately one snooze.

the cadence is the road. you do not exit by changing your destination. you exit by changing the cadence. one fewer snooze. one fewer 24-pack. one fewer “interesting” bottle. there is, i half-remember from a piece of writing in a doctor’s waiting room a few years ago, the kind of guidance a more disciplined man would have copied into a notebook. i did not copy it. the gist was roughly: stop, briefly, before the next exit, and ask whose road this is.

the road, in my case, is mine. i built it nine minutes at a time. that is the bad news. the slightly better news is that, in theory, i can un-build it the same way.

i am not going to. but, in theory, i could.

the building has gone quieter. the long dumb road is, for the next forty minutes, paused at a rest stop. that is enough.

for the record: i have written elsewhere about what the word “dumb” means when you actually sit with it, and about whether being stupid is a thing you can argue with. there is also the seven differences between dumb and stupid i drafted at this same desk, and the cluster pillar at idiot meaning, with credentials i absolutely do not have, which is the room you are eventually walking into anyway.

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