Jackie Kangas

Indistinct

Paul had been plagued by intrusive thoughts this morning, imagining someone just in front of him being flattened by a piano, carried above on ropes by workmen with abnormal, trunk sized arms, like in a cartoon. The irony was not lost on Paul, driving in his medium sized delivery truck, that he was far more likely to flatten someone himself, if his thoughts didn’t stop intruding. As he pulled in behind “The FairGround” a cavernous downtown bar, his first destination, he thought about velocity, and if in some way imagining flattening was compensation for wielding his delivery truck. Although the truck was about half the size of a long haul, it was still a massive construct for anyone. More irony made Paul smile to himself: truck drivers may be low skill, (Paul did not identify with his job) but are entrusted with such powerful machines, the scales of skill to power, knowledge to strength, are inverse. Rambling thoughts sustained Paul on these cold mornings, and as he parked the truck back behind the bar, his thoughts had moved on past piano flattening's and onto his delivery itinerary. Paul marked his arrival time down in his green binder.