Notes From the Road: The Texture of the Night

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I’m not sure when, exactly, I turned into Bill Murray from Groundhog Day.

Every morning I wake up to that same feeling: “We’re doing this again?”

I stumble to the bathroom and do all the morning things. Then I shuffle to the kitchen, groaning at the stiffness in my joints, and put a small pot of water on the stove for my medium-boiled eggs. I grab my shaker bottle and drop in the electrolytes and the creatine. There are supplements I take on an empty stomach, and supplements that have to wait for food. This is all less of a routine at this point and more of a ritual. If something throws it off, I feel weird about it all day.

I’ve been informed that coffee on an empty stomach causes a cortisol spike, so I wait for that sweet, sweet nectar of the somnambulist gods. You don’t really need to be awake to function if your adenosine receptors are blocked by the alchemy of caffeine. But cortisol is bad, so for that, I need the eggs, or maybe a spoonful of peanut butter, or if I’m feeling really wild, both. I used to fast every day until the afternoon, but apparently I was doing it wrong. The anxiety beast must be kept in his cage with the door firmly locked, and the lights turned down low.

I have nobody to talk to about what the day has in store, so I tap the spacebar on my keyboard to wake up my PC on my way to the kitchen. The two 34-inch monitors blink on, the hard drives whirring quietly as they spin back to life. I’ll spend at least an hour, maybe two, “monitoring the situation” online. Checking notifications and news. Tweeting out early takes. Looking for anything I can come up with that might go viral. I’m a bit addicted, but I don’t care anymore. Part is mental stimulation. Part is because it’s the only version of human interaction I get most days. Part is because if I’m smart about it, it makes me money. This month, my X payout was almost enough to pay my rent.

Some days, I research. Some days, I write. This week, thanks to a referral from a reader, I also picked up another voice acting gig. On alternating weeks, I do a podcast. That’s a two-day minimum process. There’s prep, recording, post production, uploading, descriptions and tagging, thumbnail creation, creating and captioning clips, and promotion.

But as far as I can tell, I’m just spinning my wheels. Not making measurable progress of any kind. Not losing ground, but not gaining. Just running to stand still.

Most nights, right around dinner time, I wolf something down and head reluctantly out to my car. I hesitate, sigh, open the DoorDash app, and I take offers for shit money.

On this particular night, there’s a dusting of pollen so thick on my windshield that it turns into a sulfur-colored slurry that runs in fat rivulets down the side paths of the wipers when I hit the spray. I must have leaned on the dust coating the car unwittingly, because there are pale yellow smudges on my black athletic shorts when I climb inside. I bought the green bug dissolving fluid, but it’s not making a dent in the waxy smears I collected on the windshield during last weekend’s trip with the kids to the beach. I’m going to have to get a full contact car wash even if it costs 20 bucks. It’s not like I live somewhere with a hose bib anymore.

I’m trying to find the cheapest place to get gas, but my phone keeps switching between Wi-Fi and mobile data in the apartment complex parking lot, and the Upside app won’t load. When I finally spot a place with a good discount and head that way, the directions turn out to be made up. They take me into a medical plaza. I know it’s futile, but I’m curious, so I follow the GPS right to the end of the path. It drops me at the front doors of an empty office building, not a gas pump in sight. I don’t have the time or the patience to keep trying to find the best discount, so I end up just going to the same Circle K I always do.

Gas is painfully close to $4 a gallon, which makes the economics of underpaid deliveries a bit complicated. The first pump I go to has a non responsive touchscreen and rejects my debit card. I pull around to another free spot, but this one is facing the low evening sun, and the screen is so cracked and sun damaged I can barely see what it says. I contort my position, trying to cast shadows with my body to get through the prompts. I’m tired as hell, and I need caffeine, so as the gas starts pumping, I head into the store. A young black woman opens a plywood-covered door before I get there, and it slams open, hard. She looks over her sunglasses at it in disbelief.

I shift into a subtly urban mode of speech. “That’s some Superman shit right there!” I say. She laughs. I’m the only white guy in the store. This isn’t a bad neighborhood in general, but the clientele in this store always feel very inner city for reasons I don’t fully understand. In a way, I almost blend in. I’m a bit rumpled, my clothes are generic, and I look poor, probably because I am.

I go to grab a White Monster from cooler. The last time I saw my oldest daughter she scolded me for drinking one. Told me the taurine in it is bad for me. She’s probably right, but it’s cheaper than coffee, and I tend to think falling asleep at the wheel is even more unhealthy. A man in a blue and black windbreaker, staggering drunk, is going through the beer case. I don’t see what he takes, but when I get to the register, I see him walk out with his backpack in hand without checking out, and as I watch him leave, I know like I know the sun will rise tomorrow that he shoplifted his choice of fine fermented beverages and waltzed out the door without any fear of being caught.

I look at the cashier, but he neither notices or cares. He looks like a drug dealer. He’s got sunglasses on, hood up, thin dreadlocks trailing out just above his collarbone. He’s absolutely radiating “I don’t give a fuck” energy. My brain coughs up an awkward thought: “This morning, you were doing a podcast about Skinner Boxes and behavioral control mechanisms, and tweeting about the intentional dead-ending of physics by an unseen government program. Now, you’re here, in the middle of all this, about to go deliver fast food to people who can’t even be bothered to meet you at the door.” Two years now, I’ve been doing this shit to fill in the financial gaps, and the shine has absolutely worn off. It was fun in the beginning, because it was different. Now, it’s an unpleasant lifeline. Most days, it’s the only thing that gets me out of the apartment, works with my dark moods, and gives me the flexibility to work on stuff I actually care about on my own time.

A necessary evil.

After taking this brief inventory of my life, I decide the beer thief is definitely not even a little bit my problem. I don’t say a word. I just pay, take my drink, and head out through the boarded-up door. My phone chimes, and I’ve got an order to pick up from the Panda Express across the street. It takes me almost ten minutes to get through the traffic, make the requisite U-turn past the median, and find parking. When I finally get inside, I’m told the order has already been picked up by another driver. I get $2 for my effort, and have to tap out a damn essay about why I didn’t hit the happy face button to rate my satisfaction with the transaction.

I pull out to the stoplight behind a generic crossover SUV. The driver is timid, and won’t commit to making progress. I end up yelling, “PLEASE pull the F out into the intersection!” because they’re going straight, or left, and all I need to do is make a right hand turn, but Newtonian physics says I have to wait until she’s the hell out of my way before I can occupy the space where her vehicle is idling.

She finally moves. Another, worse order comes in and I’m off again to a Japanese hibachi place just a mile or so down the road. When I walk inside, I notice there’s not a single eat-in customer, even though it’s the middle of the dinner rush. Never a great sign. The place has an underlying sour smell, something between laundry left in the washer too long, old sweat, and outright despair. It’s the kind of place that brings in a steady stream of disheveled old white men in crumpled shorts and New Balance sneakers with tube socks pulled up to mid-calf who come in to to grab takeout, but never stay.

I grab my $7 delivery order in its white plastic bag, and head back out on the road. The setting sun is shining straight in my eyes now, and nobody is letting me merge, but that’s just par for the course on your average Tuesday. The miles tick by. I’ve got no music, because my stereo is still broken. The shop that the dealer sent me to to have it repaired is almost certainly a money laundering operation, and the last time I texted the installer to ask if I could get on his schedule, he only replied with the words, “I’m in court.” I finally make it to the appointed exit, and leave the highway. As I do, I smash through a dense cloud of some kind of summer insect that adds new, bright points to the constellation of dried windshield goo that’s catching the light. My car is slowly filling with the greasy smell of fried egg roll wrappers, and an undertone of something slightly grassy. Probably the soggy, overheated vegetables within.

I look in the rearview mirror and notice that my hair is fluffed up like the plumage of some exotic bird. I need a haircut. I need better hair product. I need what’s left up there to stop thinning so much or I’m going to have to just shave my whole damn head. It would certainly be easier. Still, I’m not sure I’m ready to face that version of myself. I already don’t know who I am anymore. it would be weird as hell to look in the mirror and have one more reason not to recognize the guy looking back at me. I throw a baseball hat on, backwards to keep the bill out of my face. I wonder absently if it makes me look like that Steve Buscemi meme.

“How do you do, fellow kids?”

This delivery is taking me way off the beaten path. I’m supposed to be working North Raleigh but I have no idea where I am. Too many deliveries like that on weeknights. Long drives with no restaurants for additional pick ups. Makes it difficult to stay busy and leaves you burning gas through long return stretches without pay.

Turns out the spot is a big, labyrinthine apartment complex with no easy way to tell from the parking lot which units are where. A guy sees me searching and directs me where to go. Easily saves me 5-10 minutes of looking around. I still get marked late on the delivery.

I took the elevator up, but decide to take the stairwell back down, because it’s the more direct route. As I make it to the bottom, I realize that it looks like I’ve stumbled into the Backrooms.

It turns out I was right about the order taking me off track. On a busy night in a good area you can pick up a lot of double orders and you barely have time to finish the one you’re on before a new one comes in. It’s been about 10 minutes without another ping. And the odds are, the longer this takes, the next one that does come in, isn’t going to be worth taking.

True to form, it’s not. But I’ve been turning down bad orders all night, and the app penalizes me for self-preservation. I curse out loud and take it.

This one is from a pizza place I’ve never been to before, and when I get there, there’s nobody in the lot. I’m getting the feeling it’s going to be a slow night.

The orders are garbage the whole night. The next night too. The days blur together. At another pizza place after dark, the girl at the counter and I exchange perfunctory pleasantries.

And then I break the fourth wall. I ask her if she ever feels like she’s on a hamster wheel, going nowhere.

She says yes, but then pivots unexpectedly to optimism:

“It’s gonna be OK, I promise,” she says, and she sounds like she means it. Sounds like she sees something in me that tells her I really need to hear it.

“Don’t give up,” she tells me, as if she’s reading my mind. I head back to the car, doing a terrible job of holding back the tears.

So many nights, giving up feels like the only sensible thing to do. What other option is there when you’ve lost everything you’ve ever cared about, and every day is just a variation on what feels like living in the state of total failure?

I finish my night early, because I’m not willing to take any more bad orders. Not worth the time, the gas, or the wear and tear. I punch in the address for a Barnes & Noble with a large cafe I found a couple nights before. Looked like a place people went to hang out and read. Possibility of ambient human presence. Better than going back to the solitary confinement of my little apartment.

I get to the store and take my time walking the plaza. When I finally head inside, I realize I’ve been here before. This Barnes & Noble is different. Laid out in a unique way. Nonlinear. Asymmetrical. Big titles on taller-than-normal shelves. I walk around for a bit before making my way back to the cafe and ordering a cold brew. I shouldn’t be drinking coffee this late, but why not? Not like I have anyone to see in the morning. I’d intended on reading a book, but as I sit at my little table, the solitude starts closing again, and I reach for the easy dopamine my phone dispenses. Before I’m half way done with the coffee, an announcement comes over the loudspeaker alerting shoppers that the store is closing. I make a comment to an old man sitting at a nearby table about how there needs to be more places for reading past 9PM. He laughs noncommittally and mumbles something wordless that might signal agreement or just politeness, it’s hard to say.

The next time I go out, I decide I can’t do it. Can’t make myself start up the app. Can’t face the disappointment of wasting my night for barely enough money to cover the gas. I decide to drive downtown, grab some photos, feel the texture of the night.

I’ve lived in this city for almost two years, but I’m perpetually in survival mode, and I don’t have places I think of as my own, my favorites. I have never just walked downtown. Never taken out my phone and grabbed photos. I feel like a tourist here, but when I visit other cities, I always try to capture their vibe. I have somehow managed not to ever do this right here, where I spend every day.

Tonight, I’m fixing that.

I find a parking spot near Moore Square, and head out on foot. It’s a weeknight, and a warm one, so there are pockets of activity without any one place seeming to reach full energy. The bars are wide open, doors flung wide, but most have not even a single patron inside. This is a city where, despite roughly 100,000 college students swelling the population when school is in session, most people are tucked into their beds at 10PM.

I don’t have any place to be. I don’t want to go to a bar alone, and $16 cocktails feels a little steep even if I did. Instead, I scan the buildings for visually interesting scenes, letting the city itself be my canvas. Photos immediately begin suggesting themselves, and before long I’m framing shots every few feet. There’s something hauntingly liminal and beautiful about the empty commercial spaces at night, even more so than the ones that are still open and busy:

Everywhere I look, the cityscape is painted in bright colors. Not murals or buildings as much as as neon and light. The stuff you just can’t see during the day. I only walked a few blocks, but I found so many little treasures in such a short time:

Raleigh isn’t a big city, but it’s been around a while — founded in 1792 — and it has an eclectic mix of architecture, both classic and modern:

Some of my favorite sights in this city are the historic Victorian homes in the Oakwood neighborhood. Surrounded by very old oaks, there’s a warmth, a deep, lived-in feeling, that emanates from them like a kind of visual poetry. Especially at night:

My excursion ends about an hour and a half after it began. I’ve ranged about as far from my car as I’m willing to go on foot, especially in a city I don’t know the layout of well enough not to get lost. The homeless population is congregating for the night, and I decide I want something to eat, so I make my way back to my car to head out.

I drive by a cocktails and restaurant type place that’s one of the few places open until midnight, but as I look in the windows, it feels too bougie for my shorts, t-shirt, and baseball cap. And everyone in there is with someone else. I hate going into these places alone. I pass an upscale taco shop that recently opened, but it’s not what I want. I decide to hit my local Wegman’s, which is open late, and I shop my way through their discounted meat section, grabbing some shaved beef for my dinner, and some pre-marinated pork roast for the next day. I grab some peppers, onions, and mushrooms, and a couple other things, then head back to my place, which, if I’m feeling honest, sometimes feels a little too much like voluntarily checking in to a prison cell.

I put away my groceries and begin cooking. It’s way too late to be eating, but I haven’t had anything since about 4 in the afternoon, so I decide to compromise and make only a small portion of my impromptu Philly cheesesteak bowl and pour myself a drink.

Satisfied at last, I clean up, and roll my TV stand out from the wall where I keep it out of the way during the day to the foot of my bed. I turn it on, but never end up watching anything. I just scroll until I doze off, startling myself awake with the sound of my phone falling out of my hand onto the floor.

Another one in the books. Another Groundhog Day survived. I guess I broke the pattern a little bit this time, but in the end, I still can’t help wondering what difference it makes, or what any of this is even for.

That’s a question for tomorrow, I decide — a question for every successive tomorrow — as I slip off again to restless sleep.

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