yellow page, blue car, red wheel, date unknown

Feeling too media-obsessed to notice how far we've strayed from the wellspring, we approach the toll plaza and I am thinking more about record labels and Wayne's World than how I'm going to pay off my library fines, let alone cross the bridge. It makes sense, this hunger for connection and unity through an artist or a writer, might even be enough to sustain someone through a lifetime of righteous work, but is "Tryin' to get to Heaven" gonna get us across the bridge when the fog has rendered the windshield opaque?


Editor's note: Now that the stretch to the glove compartment has become our morning calisthenic and FasTrak is the most honest form of inhuman interaction there is, now that vinyl albums fly from off the sidewalk out the window of a dorm-room dream to shatter former crutches, now that the time is 20 minutes before 20:00 and the bridge is beginning to seem like it has more than two ends, certain resistance--even analog--melts in the passenger footwell, that there are some bridges sound waves can't cross, and others that are drawn in just in time to let the lessons of immobility slam our faces against the cinder-block wall of machismo speed and the laurel of accomplishment we've been erecting.