The roadside signs in rural Texas read “Speed Limit: ‘We don’t care,'” or at least, that’s how I interpret them. Officially, signs declare a maximum of 80 miles per hour, but this strikes me as an arbitrarily large number put there because the signs can’t actually declare indifference.
With functionally no speed limit and light traffic on I-10, I give my car a bit of a workout on the way out of town. Trucks slow down the right lane, so I switch to the open left and speed up. As my car touches 100 mph, I notice blue lights flashing on the side of the road ahead. Some idiot has been pulled over by what I assume is the town’s lone cop.
I have made two incorrect assumptions.
My mistake isn’t immediately clear when I see flashing lights in my rear view mirror as well. First, I try to get out of the way of the police car behind me, thinking that he’s responding to the traffic stop ahead. When I pass the traffic stop, the cop remains behind me still, and after I stop my car on the shoulder, the sheriff informs me that he clocked me doing 94 in an 80.
Van Horn County employs at least two cops.
The ticket will cost me $175, which strikes me as excessive. The only speeding ticket I ever received before, back in high school, cost me $32; that was for going 43 in a 35, although everyone I surveyed at lunch the following Monday thought the speed limit on that road was 40. According to the photocopied sheet the sheriff gives me, the minimum cost of a speeding ticket in Van Horn is $150, which can be assessed for going one mile over the speed limit.
Because I must, I accept my share of the blame in this. I was the one driving, ignoring the posted speed limit signs (and feigning ignorance to the cop). But I was not alone in my responsibility.
Thom Yorke is also to blame.
One hour, three minutes and 57 seconds after I turn my car’s stereo back on and return to the road, Mr. Yorke offers his thoughts on my attempt to hold him responsible for my speeding ticket.
“You do it to yourself, you do, and that’s what really hurts,” he sings, 42 seconds into “Just.” I can’t argue, and not just because he’s not actually here—these words are correct more often than not. That’s a phenomenon I’m willing to take responsibility for myself, because I’m the one who chooses when I listen to this song, and I only listen to it in one of two contexts: Either I’m listening to The Bends, the album where this song appears seventh, or I’ve skipped straight to it because I’m upset about something. The latter category is far more common—this is one of my default songs for when I’m in a self-loathing mood, which is a large percentage of the time.
Today, fortunately, is one of the former times.
Some time ago, while I planned this trip, I got the idea for what I have deemed my Grand Radiohead Experiment: Listening to all seven Radiohead LPs in the chronological order of their release to try and find out if it might somehow expand my consciousness or whatever. I spent a little while debating which day of this journey on which to conduct the experiment, ultimately deciding upon today because today should be the longest day of driving, and the desolation of Radiohead should prove a nice complement to the sparse nature of rural Texas.
While Radiohead’s music proves as beautiful as ever, my consciousness does not expand. Much like track five on OK Computer, I am let down.
In a town called Junction, I diverge from the Interstate system for the first time this trip. Instead of remaining on I-10 all the way to San Antonio, I’m taking state routes the rest of the way to Austin. While the speed limit drops, the drive becomes more interesting, winding past farms and through small towns.
A great many politicians would call this “real America,” singing its praises during their stump speeches. While that might win them some votes, it ignores a fundamental fact: This version of America is dying.
Nowhere is that more clear than as I pass through a town called London, which is virtually the opposite of its British namesake. While England’s London is a bustling metropolis, a world-class city, the London that lies along TX-377 is quite literally in a state of decay. Many of the buildings appear to be long-abandoned. Others are in a state of disrepair that would indicate abandonment, but I think I see people inside as I drive by. To me, the greatest sign of the town’s failure lies in its liquor store, whose roof has caved in on itself, its wood visibly rotting.
A town is truly dead when its residents are too depressed to even drink.
My first passport was issued in 1986, when my mom and I tagged along on one of my father’s business trips to England1. Fourteen years passed before I got my current passport, when we went to Europe for the trial.
By the time we reached London on that trip, I had long since checked out. Every day, my mom and sister went on one touristy adventure or another—the only one I can remember is Stonehenge—while I did as much as I could to disengage from it all.
I didn’t want to be there, plain and simple, but flying standby back to Memphis would have cost everything I’d earned from working at a day camp the previous summer. So I stayed, and I hated it, and I haven’t left the continent since.
I considered visiting Lockerbie for the 20th anniversary a few months ago, but circumstances necessitated me attending the memorial in Arlington, Virginia instead. I’ve thought about going a lot of places, but there’s always one reason or another to not go. It’s funny to think that I got a frequent flier card at age two, and now, I fly begrudgingly at best.
Sometimes, I feel like I’ve been surpassed by all my peers, that all my friends are more worldly than me.
Other times, I’m pleasantly surprised.
When I get to Austin, I announce my location on social media, not expecting any sort of response. One friend does reply, though: My childhood friend Joel, who apparently recently moved back to Austin after some amount of time in Houston. After exchanging a couple of messages, he tells me that he’s having drinks with a friend, and suggests that I meet up with them.
I last saw Joel in late 2002, at the final show of a band that included several friends of ours. In fact, I last saw most of my childhood friends that night, because I haven’t bothered contacting any of them during any of my increasingly infrequent trips to Memphis.
Six and a half years later, Joel looks recognizable, if not the same. I don’t know if he would say the same of me: I’ve got more than a week’s worth of scruff on my face, and I’m wearing the hat I purchased days before this trip to protect myself from the sun as I drove2. It’s a navy blue military-style hat, the kind that was made iconic by revolutionaries like Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, and can now be bought for less than $8 at H&M.
Joel’s gained a bit of weight, but he still carries himself the same way he always did. Growing up, Joel was always one of the coolest people I knew, and I spent much of our teenage years trying to figure out why he was cool and I was not, which is probably exactly why he was cool and I was not. He was good at sports, but never the best. He was friends with the mischievous kids, but never got in trouble himself. He dated the girls that all the guys had crushes on, but I always got the impression that those girls felt lucky that they were dating him.
Joel now works as a lawyer.
He passed the bar last year, and was hired at a law firm in Austin last month. It sounds like he’s doing well professionally, but he seems unsatisfied. Joel talks about wanting to do something more interesting with his law degree, but he doesn’t know what—he mentions having wanted to write a book similar to the works of Malcolm Gladwell, but lost interest in the research stage when he realized how much work it would take.
Joel’s friend, meanwhile, drove up today from San Antonio, and since I forget his name within moments of being introduced, I’ll refer to him as Antonio, despite the fact that he is a slightly pudgy, white frat-guy type. Antonio tells me that his country band is playing on 6th Street tomorrow night, and invites me to the show. I reply that I have plans tomorrow night, and anyway, country’s not my thing.
The musical divide keeps coming up over the course of the conversation. When I mention how Austin has a fantastic reputation among music fans in Seattle, Joel rolls his eyes and insists everything got worse when Austin City Limits went all indie-rock. When I mention the Grand Radiohead Experiment that took up most of my day’s worth of driving, Joel and Antonio wonder aloud whether they should do the same thing, but with Jimmy Buffett.
Now, here’s the thing: I am not a cool person. I’m a loser, baby: I’ve never had a real job, never had what I would describe as a functional relationship, and, as recently as 2003, I considered Matchbox Twenty my favorite band3.
That said, I can’t shake the impression that I am now cooler than Joel.
Back in the day, it seemed like Joel had all the answers. Maybe he still does, but, to me at least, the questions have changed. Now, Joel drinks bottles of Bud Light, while I ask what the bar has on tap and weigh my options before ordering. When the clock strikes 10:30, he notes that he hasn’t been up this late in weeks, and when I comment that I’m feeling jet lagged from driving across two time zones yesterday, he says he doesn’t really understand time zones. He’s never lived outside of the Central time zone. As far as I’m aware, he’s never lived in a state that did not start with the letter T.
But, just like when we were younger, Joel knows things I don’t: Specifically, he tells me what our old friends have been up to. He caught up with a lot of them last month, when one of those friends got married in New Orleans, which in Joel’s telling, sounds like a reunion of much of the old crew. Knowing that friend as I did, it seems funny to me that he’s now married, but I’m sure he’s changed as much in the last seven years as I have.
Maybe that’s the point. Joel maintained these lifelong friendships, while I didn’t care. Joel changed and grew, and yet remained close to the same people as years passed, whereas I’ve flitted from friends to friends with my changing interests. Once upon a time, Joel was cool and I wasn’t, and now that dynamic may have flipped, but does it really matter? Cool is just another word for appealing, and the whole point of being appealing is who you’re appealing to. If he isn’t cool (and cool is subjective, and this is an entirely different part of the country from where I live, so it’s entirely possible that he is cool here, and I’m still not, and this is all kind of moot), it’s because he’s beyond cool. He no longer has a use for it. He no longer has to impress people with his taste in music and clothing and humor. He’s engaged, has a good job, and a strong core of friends. Why bother being cool anymore?
When some of Antonio’s friends arrive, Joel heads home, leaving me with a half-dozen unimpressed strangers and a new set of doubts.
- Before we sent in my old passport to be replaced, my mom showed it to my sister and me. My sister’s reaction was to exclaim, “Oh, you were so cute! What happened?”
- Which I actually started wearing after I drove from Sacramento to Los Angeles with my car’s top down, and got a sunburn that made me look like Two-Face, if he had been played by Paul Giamatti instead of Aaron Eckhart.
- When I realized they weren’t anymore, I wrote a Livejournal post that, in hindsight, reads like a minor identity crisis.