They'd gotten to the point of complete understanding of this complex phenomenon and, to wrap everything up, just needed to do one more last experiment.

And we were it.

So they gave us a late model Dodge Dart, 50 feet of American Rope Company No. 3 general purpose 1/4 inch rope, and a box of International Blindfold Corp.'s No. 7 Black Acrylic Blindfolds, and we got in the Dart and drove off into the New Jersey sunrise. It was 6 AM. A Smith and Wesson No. 4 .357 Automatic Weapon and a bottle of General Drug Company's No. 11 800 mg. Meth-Amphetamine tablets were locked in the glove compartment and unavailable to us for another 5 hours.

Beyond that, there were no constraints or prescriptions on us, so we drove due west till about 11:15 and then, when the traffic started getting dense, we tied the gas pedal down with the rope, pushed the steering wheel out of the way, and blindfolded ourselves. Then we opened all the windows to the max, kicked back in the comfortable upholstery, opened the glove compartment, and let Newton and/or Heisenberg take care of the rest.1

By being so firmly in lockstep with the fundamental laws of physics, we knew we could go on like this forever without lifting a finger, and our driving down some endless road unseeing and out of control wouldn't end until the universe itself did too.

Fortunately, though Rhapsody had been devastated by recent food riots brought on by the war on war, the one song they still had available for download was "Disintegration", and so it played now on permanent loop in the background as we drove on through stark southwest coastal saved daylight.

Meanwhile, fragments of lives and conversations drifted in through the windows from passing cars and, being blindfolded and with no responsibility for control, we had nothing better to do than listen.

But pretty soon, regardless of the make or model of the car as determined by the sound of its engine, all stories started sounding the same. People were going to or coming from the same kinds of places having done or about to do the same kinds of things with the same kinds of anticipations before, and the same kinds of dashed hopes or self-deceptions, after. Their interrelations came from the same small set of possibilities multiplied by the same small set of character types, and ultimately channeled into the same microscopic set of (tragic) outcomes.

So we stopped listening and each of us started searching out loud for whether there was or wasn't, in our early lives, some teeny tiny little insignificant thing which, if done differently way back then at the cost of nearly zero effort, would have made it all suck significantly much less today?

But when we were only halfway through recounting every last fucking detail of every last thing anyone had ever fucking done, someone finally broke the spell and said, "Let's get fucking realistic and start thinking about doing something about something we can actually DO something about."

But everybody just groaned, because utterly stupid recommendations like that one completely overlooked the hunger we still had deep down for doing something about something we COULDN'T do ANYTHING AT ALL about! A hunger that vanished in inverse proportion to the reason we couldn't do anything at all about it being because IT DIDN'T FUCKING EXIST.3

Notes

1. Though Russian Roulette Driving, as it was sometimes called, had enjoyed brief popularity as a world religion back in the 80's, most of its orthodox adherents were killed off in car crashes and the practice of its sacraments2 were tacitly outlawed.

But once the religion itself died, Russian Roulette Driving was able to reemerge (under the name "Quantum Mechanical Driving") as a sport individuals could practice at will without fear of recrimination.

2. The foremost sacrament being the one where all passengers in a given car finally agree to turn off Collision Avoidance -- for good.

3. That is to say a hunger that existed only in direct proportion to the reason we couldn't do anything at all about it being because IT DIDN'T FUCKING EXIST. Which is to say, the more it didn't exist, the hungrier we were to do something about it that we couldn't possibly do.

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