prompt: walk, title: it's the wrong way in "the next big thing" flash fiction

Distance does funny things to your mind, to your experience of reality. There was this band, this perfectly-mediocre fine-in-the-background dumb-if-you-listen-closely white-boy funk jam band called “Sublime” and when I was a kid growing up in northern New York state at the edge of the Adirondack Mountains, they were fine, they were perfectly fine. Didn’t care much for them, but if friends were listening to Sublime or they popped on the radio while I was driving, it wouldn’t bother me any. Inoffensive insubstantial audio wallpaper. White noise, literally white-boy noise.

But, you see, they were from Long Beach just south of Los Angeles, and every other damn song had a shout-out to Long Beach, so when I drove as a gopher for a production company and later, after the strike layoff, picking up semen analyses for medical labs, every third drop on the radio was goddamn Sublime and I learned to hate them with the passion of ten thousand burning suns.

I wanted to get out of the van on the One-oh-One and walk the insulated cooler with the heating pads to keep the wigglers alive back to the lab, just to get away from “Lovin’ Is What I Got” for the fifth time that eight-hour shift. Hoof it all the way from Burbank to West Hills just to escape the mangling of Summertime from Porgy & Bess with a Dave Matthews-on-quaaludes bassline.

Years later, back in the little towns of the Mohawk River Valley again, when they come over the FM dial from Utica or Albany once every couple of weeks, though, they are perfectly fine again.

Forgivably bland. Standard pop lack of innovation or skill. Background radio static, once more.

Distance does funny things to your mind. Sometimes it makes the bad things better, sometimes it makes the merely tedious completely unbearable. Donald Fagen from Steely Dan hated his times at Bard College so much, California could tumble into the sea before he’d go back to Annandale.

With Warren Zevon, who Frank roadied for when first he strode into our blighted human sphere, no matter how many mystics or statistics said California would slide into the ocean, Zevon knew it wouldn’t happen until he discharged the onerous debt he’d accrued on all his old drunken jags.

You walk toward your dream, the dream turns out to be at a fixed distance from you, just like the horizon. We run away from home because we cannot fit in only to discover we fit in other places even less than where we started from. In Mother Russia, a hack like Yakov Smirnov might opine, circus runs away with you. Distance and time, stale rubber bands, keep just bringing you back to finally realize, until you learn to truly live with yourself, you aren’t going to be happy anywhere.

Your perspective, just like your personal freedom, realistically ends just past the tip of your nose.

Until then you’re only going to stumble into ironies that border upon the, well, upon the sublime.