I decided to pray the rosary, even though I didn’t have my rosary beads with me, in the vehicle. I’d meant to bring them with me but had forgotten them, or anyway had thought I’d brought them with me, when I’d departed the city, but had discovered about an hour or two into the drive that in fact I did not have them on my person, where they usually were, and that I must have left them somewhere in the apartment during the time that I was putting some of my belongings into a backpack, while I was preparing to go out the door.

For my own part, I was trying to remain untroubled, but wasn’t entirely succeeding. For instance, I would remind myself that the situation I was in required patience (or anyway invited one to practice patience), and that as such it was an opportunity to sanctify myself by imitating the long-suffering of Christ, albeit in a small, unheroic way. And for some moments I would do just that. But then my mind would wander, I’d become distracted by one thought or another, which itself was produced by the information that was reaching me through my senses, primarily my sight. And I would hear myself sigh, or utter some uncharitable remark, aimed at the drivers around me. And in so doing I’d ‘wake to myself’, so to speak, I’d remember that I had very little to complain about, compared to others. And the cycle of patience-and-impatience would begin again.

So anyway, to jump forward a bit, as I said I was going to do, yes…some time later I was driving through the outskirts of a city, from one side of it to another, during the evening rush, on a section of interstate that makes a loop around what I guess is called the metropolitan area, so that traffic was heavy, and cars and pickups and semis and other vehicles were continually merging, and switching lanes, and trying to exit, and now and then a commuter would make use of his or her horn, and there was, in brief, a feeling in the air of impatience, and irritability, and dissatisfaction with one’s lot in life, or perhaps with just the situation, which might have had a perfectly reasonable explanation (if one was to take into account certain factors and statistical anomalies that involved, say, city planning, demographics, and structural engineering), but which, on the other hand, might not have had any such explanation; but which anyway would, very likely, serve only to aggravate the average person behind the wheel were such an explanation to be posited to them, in this scenario, as a means of alleviating their mood.

That is really the only error that a writer must never commit — that of producing boredom in the reader. The reader wants at least to be entertained.

Which isn’t to say I can permit it to be boring.

Although, because this narrative that I’m writing isn’t a novel, but something closer to a work of non-fiction, or memoir, I suppose I might have some leeway. By which I mean that maybe I can permit this thing to resemble the banality of life, to some extent.

It isn’t like life, where events will sometimes follow one another in a banal or trivial way. And where the accrual of meaning doesn't seem so continual and insistent.

Not because they, the reader, are being insistent or unreasonable, but because that is how narrative functions — everything that appears in it wants to be read in relation to everything else.

Which is why I said, at the beginning of this digression, that I was going to ‘skip forward’ a bit in the narrative. Because everything a writer includes in a narrative will draw to itself the appearance of meaning, or necessity. So that if I say to my reader, ‘Hey, look at this…”, and describe some scene or another, that reader is going to try to frame it in terms of what has come before, and what will come after.

None of which is interesting in the least, I’m sure, but which I mention now because it came to mind when I was explaining how unremarkable my interaction with the employee who’d appeared at the drive-thru window had been. As if by describing the moment that had preceded that interaction I could give you an idea of what the actual interaction had been like, without having to bore you with the so-called ‘details’, or present the scene with such starkness and finality that it might cause you to think that I thought it mattered more than it did, and thus invite you to seek in it some profound meaning, or clue, when really it was just another ordinary moment in a very long sequence of the same.

Let me just say then that, after I’d placed my order at the intercom that you stop at and speak into, as you lean your head out the window of your vehicle (and the voice of the employee you’re talking to crackles a little with static, when they respond), I sat for a few minutes in the line of cars that were ahead of me, rolling slowly forward from time to time, as each of us drivers lifted our foot off our respective brake pedals, and put our foot back down again, as, one by one, a customer completed their transaction and pulled away, until there was no one in front of me, and it was now my turn to draw even with the window out of which the employee’s arm would appear, first to take my credit card and then, after the card had been swiped, to return the card to me along with, in a brown paper sack on which had been printed the logo and emblem of the franchise I happened to be at, the menu items I’d requested and now had paid for.

I’m going to skip forward a bit in the narrative now, because I don’t know what else to do, I apologize. If I was a better writer I’d probably include a description of my interaction with the employee who served me at the window of the drive-thru at the fast-food restaurant I patronized. The problem for me, as a writer, is that nothing remarkable occurred, during that interaction, so I don’t know how to present it. Or rather, I know how to present it but don’t know what to say in the lead-up to the presentation of it, so as to make it seem as though it has relevance to whatever else I’ve been saying here, in these entries.

The sun will always set only in the west, is what I’m saying. And that cannot help but mean something to everyone, even if everyone experiences it on their own.

I might even go so far as to say it means the same thing universally, to everyone, no matter where on the globe a person lives.

Maybe it matters symbolically, but not literally. Or literally, but not symbolically. Who’s to say? Everybody knows that the West means something in the American imagination.

The direction I happened to be traveling was west, by the way, I don’t think I mentioned that. Not that the direction of travel necessarily matters in an account like this. It may or may not, I don’t know.

But so, as I was saying…because I didn’t want to veer very far from the course on which I was heading, on the highway, even though I was hungry, I waited till I saw a franchise whose signage and emblem, at the top of a pole, were visible above the treetops and foliage at the end of whatever exit ramp I was nearing, and adjacent to which ramp that franchise had been built, for the very type of traveler I apparently was.

My point being that the purpose that I cite in explanation for these trips, to anyone who might ask me, does not seem to be the ‘real’ purpose, even if it is a legitimate one. And even if, as well, I’m always hoping it will become the ‘real’ purpose.

I’ve never been able to, I should say. That is, I’ve never been able to write the kind of book I am talking about, or imagining, even if I have always, on these trips, ‘gathered material’ in some sense of that phrase. I don’t even know what sort of book it would be, were I to in fact write it. Which I suppose is why I’ve resorted to whatever book this record is, that you are reading now.

That outward purpose being what it had always been, or anyway had most frequently been, which was to see if I could gather material for a book.