I could explain how I got here, but you wouldn't believe me. Suffice it to say that I'm sitting in a diner opposite a man dressed in a leather greatcoat and mirrored sunglasses as he sofly but seriously explains things to me. Things about the government, and about people, and about reality and truth and freedom. I miss a lot of what he's saying, because I'm in a kind of shock about what just happened. I don't really trust what he's saying, honestly. Not intuitively, anyway. Intellectually, though, I know he's probably right about everything he's saying. I've seen this scene before, in movies and books and monthly comic strips and every other format imaginable, and if there's one thing I've learned it's that the man in a leather greatcoat is always right. Now he's coming to the end of the speech, and about now that I'm in on things I have to take a stand, make a difference (the Universe has a hackneyed screenwriter, it would seem), and it hits me that sure, my job sucks, my apartment's too small and my girlfriend's about to leave me, but that honestly I prefer the angst of a stupid life to the ecstacy and anguish of an enlightened one, and I look him right in the eye and tell him I want out.

And he comes right back with some bullshit truth, and this time I choose not to follow it because I really truly don't want to know. "I don't care," I tell him. "Life's mediocre. I'm mediocre. But I like mediocrity. I'm used to it. I'm comfortable with it. I don't want your thrilling highs at such and such a price. I don't want to be special. I want to be swept away in the dust of history, I want to be forgotten. I don't want to know. Make me forget." And he does something, I can't quite catch what, some motion or some word, and tells me goodbye and walks out of the diner, greatcoat billowing behind him, knowing eyes hidden behind mirrorshades. I watch him go, relieved and regretful at once, and reflect on what I've learned... about the world and, more to the point, about myself. And I...

...Uh...

I'm sorry, what was I saying?

back to the highway that never ends