Juxtapose

Some mornings (most, these days) I am far too tired to do anything but drive to wherever it is my car in taking me. I gradually wake up over the course of the drive but I am not cognizant enough to truly take anything in besides the very necessary things like the brake pedal, the gas, and maybe the windshield wipers, if the car has warmed up enough by then.

This morning I was more awake and when I am awake and driving and sitting in stop and go traffic for 45 minutes, I like to look around at other people in their cars. A lot of times I like to watch their lips move while they're singing along with their music, and try to assign them something good to listen to. Sometimes this little old Asian lady in a black Lexus will be next to me. She's listening to George Thorogood. Or the guy wearing a camouflage boonie hat and sunglasses in the green Kia Sportage who is listening to The Beatles.

But today I looked in my rearview to see a black Honda CR-V, the woman inside in a standard peacoat-type jacket, her hair perfectly done, her face a lot of chiseled and sharpened lines that looked to be honed more by plastic surgery than flawless aging and exercise, and her eyes covered with dark and enormous bug-eye sunglasses. She was talking, not really singing, to herself inside her cavernous SUV, her mouth moving bit by bit. And there, slipping out from beneath her behemoth sunglasses, were torrents and lines of quiet tears. I couldn't see sobbing, or rending of clothes, or gnashing of teeth. Just two big long silvery lines of saline running down the artificially-rendered crevices of her face. She looked like an attempt at being pulled-together and unaffected, with the inability to actually do so. My heart is still a little sad for her.

On the news yesterday driving home, I heard that Anna Nicole Smith died. My own eyes welled up a little for some reason. I don't really know much about her, really, except for the stuff everyone knows, the blondeness, the topless dancing, the Playboy modeling, marrying of tycoons and reality shows and the like, but I felt distinctly human at that moment and I felt her very nondescript, ordinary humanness at that moment as well. I let myself imagine a little bit (I am doing so now) the vast and meaningless vapidity that seemed to characterize this woman's entire life, and I truly, genuinely, deeply feel sorry for this... that... poor woman. Sometimes I think we (I) spend so much time lampooning people that we (I) forget that they are really people, with a beating heart and maybe an empty soul. I felt, and feel, very ashamed of myself at times like this.