Trash Pandas (The Big Nothing Part 6)

The country night is a mysterious experience. The right and left side of the endless fields, zooming besides you, becomes an ominous abyss that slowly envelops around your car. 

Under the hum of the engine, of the Inchmobile II, going almost ninety, Pink Floyd is blasted so loud that all you can hear is a mixture of screaming and guitars. I almost broke down in waves of PTSD induced hysteria as I screamed ''COLOT, COLOT, COLOT!!'' over the chaos.

Dogs coinked in unison as I stood outside to urinate by the rubble of an old grocery store. The town sounded as if it were watching us on all sides. Houses had lights on but no people inside; for all I knew they were perched up in the trees howling at us. ''Pretty ******* spooky, though, I think I'm going to get back in the car...oookayy, well, the last ******* thing we need is somebody to drive up on us but...apparently, he don't seem to care too much'' said The Inch and Jaffer.

The dark countryside seemed to wind and bend as the outlines of clouds got darker and darker. The light slowly disappeared behind us, time seemed to be left back as well, the grass in the ditches slowly swayed, and empty cans rattled around in the back seat; ''seat belt is janky as **** though'' said The Inch as he fumbled with a bus like seat belt.

''I looked up at the moon as I was pissing and there was this, like, graveyard and, like, church down the road and, it just gave you this ****** feeling that it's like, wow, I'm almost in a different dimension right now, like, it's so late that nobody else is around but I feel like I could be myself, who I wanted to be, like, it doesn't matter what I did or who I was, it was just me being who I am; and that's really, kinda the thing that makes me so happy about these types of trips because it's not the memories that you intend on making that are the good ones. It's the ones that don't mean to happen'' said The Jaffer, while shifting gear around a road riddled with scurrying trash pandas. This was devil's country.

I Put It In Paack (The Big Nothing Part Five)

Out in Kalona, another place on the long road, I stopped inside the gas station outside of town. This is a place known for it's Mennonite and Amish population. A quiet back page taken for granted as reliable physical labor and an unknown population of nobodies.  

Inside, the cashier, who wasn't Anabaptist, held an expression on his face that made him seem empty and used. He wore a faded uniform of red and black, he looked unshaven and distracted; smelling of stale nicotine. He told me that two months had passed where no one had covered the other two shifts that he wasn't supposed to be doing on top of his own, cursing a ''friend'' who claimed he would cover the supposed shift, he rubbed his eyes as he exhaled the remnants of his sanity all the while burning a hole into the ground with a thousand mile stare.

Outside, the sun slowly sunk into the distance of endless rows of farming field and road. I looked back inside the gas station and saw the attendant look out at the horizon from the window before sitting down with a gallon of gas and a rag behind the counter. He eyed the canister in the corner as he fiddled with his lighter and occasionally exchanged glances, across the ghostly parking lot, towards the nearby ''blackout bar'' and was confounded with the decision between drunkenness or arson.