Truesday: In The Headlights

Yeah, you could describe the deceased deer like that too.

One hundred and eight dead things on the ground. It’s a bit strange, once you start putting something like death into a form of measurement. Any divisional form, really, for the sake of some number-driven categorization. Death by car accident. Death by lethal injection. Death by retirement.

Death by the roadside.

It removes all notion of what actually happened there. What had to leave in order for that statistic to take its place. Those deer, for whatever reason, were once wandering about with some sort of aim. Perhaps it wasn’t a purpose I would respect, but it was a purpose nonetheless. And it was certainly a purpose no less worthy than any of the myriad of missions I tend to send myself on (which I would certainly over-embellish in an effort to appear more noble, and likely fail, but never really care).

Yet, for all their steely intentions, their heart-pure will and potential to do whatever the hell it was they were driven to do… there they are, decidedly far from the finish line of their dreams. Inert on the shoulder of I10. A plastic bag attached to an antler, waving in Old Glory fashion.

Is it a surrender? A warning? A charge? Just what in the hell does it all end up meaning when such splendor and beauty, while subjecting itself to a simple road-crossing which MUST be done in the course of being itself, finds itself abruptly ended without even the dignity of being unique in its form of passing?

Them and 107 others, lining that stretch of Texan highway like big bread crumbs of decaying death, leading me home. Venison mile markers. Ominous speed limit signs.

I counted them the way others might play Slug Bug, The License Plate Game, or There Goes Your Boy/Girlfriend (where you accuse a friend, to their face, of dating some nearby stranger with an unfortunate appearance/countenance/mental capacity – it’s very 7th grade, shitty, and secretly quite popular).

Based on the complete void where compassion should normally be, I’d have to say it bore a closer resemblance to the There Goes Your… game.

And I believe that it’s the numbers which get me there. The counting. One… Two… THREE dead things! Ah, Ah-Ah! On the light-hearted end: it’s a curiosity, and an almost comical take on the situation, as if I’m coping. On the cynical end: it’s an admission of the mechanical and inevitable end of a human-punctured life cycle, like “meh, cards get pulled on the regular, son, so count that shit.” Almost as if I was looking forward to seeing another dead deer, just to add it to my collection of sightings. “Gee, I sure hope I break a hundred!”

I totally did, too. By eight.

So why the dark take on things? Why the feel of such jaded acceptance? Is it amongst those numbers, that abstraction of what it is that I’m actually viewing, where I end up going so cold? Is that where I lose all sense of just how tragic the whole thing is? Little tragedies in that lives no more or less important than my own ceased to exist at the very spots where I have the callous nerve to anxiously shout out “that’s number sixty-seven! How do deer get so big when all they obviously like to do is DIE?!!!”

Can I really just fly right by at eighty miles an hour, thoughtlessly counting these things as if they were put there for the sole purpose of my counting amusement? Operating under the assumption that nothing could possibly be waiting to count ME under similar circumstances: flies covering what little remains of whatever drive and ambition I brought with me to some random road crossing?

Fuck. It sure seems like it.