by Jasper Gilley
I’m currently sitting in the passenger seat of a Honda Odyssey on a road trip from Chicago to eastern Pennsylvania. Since some of my highest-quality blog posts have been incubated in similar situations (see Highway Rest Stops, From Worst to Best), I thought that such success might be replicated at the moment, which is why I originally got out my laptop right now. Unfortunately, no unified topic on which a blog post might be written comes to mind, so in place of hard-hitting journalism like the aforementioned post about highway rest stops, you’ll have to be content with a compilation of random thoughts akin to those I often have on such road trips. Kind of like stand-up comedy in its spontaneous jumps from topic to topic, but less funny. Perhaps a coherent subject will emerge, but that remains to be seen. Worst case scenario, you’ll get a taste of what it is like to be in the brain of Jasper during a road trip when there’s nothing else to think about; that is, however, pretty worse as far as case scenarios go.
Also, I had three or four cups of coffee about an hour ago. This might already have been discernible. The hotel at which I stayed last night had, in addition to the usual “regular” and “decaf”, a “robust” blend of coffee, which I tried and liked. However, my present state of cardiovascular over-stimulation leads me to wonder what exactly was done to that coffee in order to make the term “robust” applicable. I haven’t done cocaine yet in my life, but TV would lead me to believe that the experience is comparable to that which I’m currently experiencing.
As I was writing the above paragraph, I passed an encampment of shacks which initially seemed too trashy to be inhabited, but presently appeared to have smoke issuing from the chimney of one of them. Very quintessentially Appalachian. The following may sound classist, but it’s actually anti-classist: little terrifies me as much as the idea of being the person living in that shack. Not because it’d be a terrible life experience – on the contrary, it not being a terrible life experience is precisely what’s terrifying. If you’re the person living in the shack that I initially thought too trashy to be habitable, the only reason you’d have to be conscious of the fact that you’re living a terrible life is the fact that you’re by an interstate on which nice cars occasionally drive by. So, you’d certainly be jealous of the people who are driving by, but really only because they have structurally sound houses and nice cars in which to drive. You have no idea why those people have structurally sound houses and why you don’t (if you did, you wouldn’t be living in said shack.) You probably also have no idea what the Opium Wars were, why/where/when they happened, or how they might relate to you, someone who likely has no reason not to overdose on fentanyl. This just sounds like the most awful thing in the world to me. What’s even worse is the idea that someone – maybe they actually exist, maybe they’re just the product of a thought experiment – is thinking the same thing about you.
That was a depressing train of thought.
Anyway, I’m a mile away from the exit for DuBois, Pennsylvania. There are a lot of trucks on the road out here by DuBois, Pennsylvania, and their continued existence/proliferation is rather baffling to me. Trucking seems like a vastly inefficient method of shipping goods, given the combination of their physical inefficiency (one truck engine pulls a lot less freight than, say, a train engine does) and their manual labor intensiveness. Let alone the fact that they all still use an internal combustion engine. I suppose a self-driving, electric truck is definitely better, but having such discrete, relatively small vehicles for shipping goods still seems suboptimal. I’m certainly aware that trucks’ existence is subsidized by the federal government in the form of highway upkeep (and also gas subsidies!), but it still seems like a pretty 1970 way of doing things. Technological progress disparity is absolutely at play here. After all, Saturn V had been built and extensively utilized by 1970. It’s weird that a system as massive, complex, and elegant as Saturn V would be fully-formed by the mid-1960s but that gas-burning trucks (essentially unchanged since the 1930s) would still be in use after one-fifth of the twenty-first century has elapsed.
I’ve been thinking lately that I’d love to try and write emotionally non-ambiguous nonfiction. Or maybe a much more abstract version of fiction. Or maybe a version of fiction with greatly increased information content. I read in a Paul Graham essay or tweet somewhere that the reason he doesn’t read much fiction anymore is because its information content is generally much lower than that of nonfiction (that is, on any given page, there’s simply less to process.) It seems like we’re actually in somewhat of a golden age for nonfiction – not for nonfiction books, but for nonfiction blog posts and/or internet-distributed essays. As far as I know, however, there’s no similar internet-native textual medium for fiction. So maybe that’s what I’d like to work on. It might end up being more like poetry (not Robert Frost-style poetry as much as T.S. Eliot-style poetry), but that wouldn’t necessarily be a problem. This is because I personally have basically 0 idea how to write characters (that is, story-type characters, not like Chinese characters), so anything fiction-esque that I write would necessarily be more abstract, if still emotionally non-ambiguous.
There’s still a bit of the Robust Coffee from the hotel sitting in a paper travel cup next to me. Since beginning the Word document in which this blog post is contained (as of this writing) – this is getting very meta – my coffee-induced delirium has subsided, which is tempting me to have some more coffee, because it’s not bad coffee and I like the taste of coffee, even if it’s bad coffee, which this coffee really isn’t. At the moment, I’m trying to figure out whether or not I enjoy being very high on coffee, in general. I usually think I do, especially if I have something productive to do, because coffee is great at making you be more productive. But I certainly wasn’t enjoying being high on coffee half an hour ago. Maybe this was because I didn’t have anything to do? I was, after all, sitting in the passenger seat of a Honda Odyssey several miles outside of DuBois, Pennsylvania.
Here’s an insight that sounds like it was incubated when I was high not exclusively on coffee: one might view the life and relationship to coffee that white-collar workers have as being one of aliens who are condemned to consume a certain drug every day in order to alter their mental state and achieve things they’re not biologically meant to achieve. That is, white-collar workers regularly bludgeon their minds into doing unnatural things (like working 9 to 5) by consuming psychotropic substances, which happen to be known as the benign “coffee.” Or, as the case may be, no-collar (e.g., sweatshirt-wearing) college students on winter break bludgeon their minds into the unnatural? act of writing silly blog posts by overdosing on the potent, psychotropically active drug known as Robust Coffee™.
It’s now been a couple of hours since the time of my initial coffee dalliance that originally inspired this post. While I’m still in a state of being affected by the coffee, I’m not sure I can any longer claim to be high on it. This combined with the fact that I’m now no longer terribly nearby to DuBois, Pennsylvania forces me to conclude the two criteria specified in the title of this post – namely, being high on coffee and being near DuBois, Pennsylvania – are no longer really true. As a result, subsequent thoughts had by me will not be Thoughts Had while High on Coffee near DuBois, Pennsylvania; they’ll just be Thoughts Had. Hence, the necessity of hereby concluding this post.