Ten years ago

I'd have it set up in my mind's eye, what I'm going to write. Clipped steps between tables searching for the booth with the phone set on the wall, the phone that worked. Compuserve with a 1 -800 dial up, cost per minute and sometimes the connection failed three quarters through. Doss, if there's one mistake, start over: C: cd "Documents and Settings: Dir c: cd "documents and settings " Administrator\Desktop. Is the D in documents capital or lower case? The middle-aged waitress with the sagging belly and sore feet wanting to know what kind of soup. Tony's asking how thick the clam chower is. Is it wall-paper paste? Then, the driver across the short wall leans over, asks in a Southern accent, blows a circle of smoke, how hard making into Laramie over Elk, the wind, the wind. How many trucks piled up coming through the blizzard on Vail, coming down to TA heaven at the bottom. And how about that tornado crossing over toward Pensacola? Louisianna, that storm, Tiger Truck Stop waiting it out, thought he'd bust a gut all that coconut cream pie, had to be eaten with the power out, outside the tiger pacing back and forth through sheets of rain. Shut up I say because any second the connection will blow and I've got five days to get through because I never made it on the last connection and there's no real truck stop in Galveston where the state park has paper cups blowing up against the beach logs and the sand is brown. I look into the waves and the future is nothing but murky. The birds are overstretched apostrophes. Both dogs are running through the bristle of beach grass. A minute of freedom out of the cab, not one of us is touching the other.