For Thursday, March 18, 1999 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 723 words

Waterman's dream

John Waterman had had it. He was outta here. He was fed up. Stimulus. Stimulus. Stimulus! He couldn't take it anymore. He had to get away.

He needed peace. He needed rest. He needed quiet. He needed opposites.

John Waterman, on his last day of work, told his boss, "I'm going away, Sam. I might come back. I don't know when. If there's still a job waiting for me -- swell. If not, oh, well."

He called a few friends and said goodbye. He didn't know where. He held an impromptu garage sale the next morning. People who shopped it did quite well. John sold of all his electronic equipment -- stereos, VCRs, TVs, computers -- for $20 each.

John convinced the neighbors to adopt his houseplants. He packed a few belongings, locked the house his grandmother had given him, apologized to the lawn, and drove away. He drove all day, toward the mountains. He didn't play the radio. He didn't use the headrest. He just drove.

John hadn't stopped to have a reflective thought in a week. He didn't want one.

Ever since the day he saw his need to escape he has driven at it headlong -- acting, doing, making it happen. Now all was behind him. He was free and on the road. The towns and buildings shrank away and disappeared. On either side of the road grew trees and sat rocks. The sun was a foot off the horizon.

John didn't know precisely what he would ultimately do, how his story would end. He was acting on a whimsical, romantic, simple, impulsive desire. He wanted to find a pastoral field on a sunny hillside miles from any road and lie down in it. He wanted to nestle in the grass, feel the dirt in his hands. He wanted to lean his shoulders against the bosomy roots of an ancient pine and study the clouds. Equally important in John's dream, he wanted to be free to lie there just as long as he liked, with no link to anything but the ground and the sky and what it meant to be a human being alive.

What drove him to this rebirthing tangent was...as he echoed earlier...stimulus. Stimulus overload. John had buried himself into his work so deeply, and covered himself over with material wealth so securely, that he hadn't noticed that he was traveling at 1,000 miles an hour. When he finally did look up, his hat blew off.

The change came one evening while unwrapping his new satellite dish after a long day chasing stocks. The manual was 20 pages long. John didn't have the patience to read it. He had enough reading to do. He had two dozen magazine subscriptions and daily newspapers from six ends of the country. He had to climb over them to reach his console.

After installing the dish incorrectly for an hour, John finally got his first signal. He picked up the program listings. He had 264 channels from broadcast feeds all over the world. He picked up the remote. It had 73 buttons, 4 sliding levers, and 2 power switches. It took 10 minutes to turn the thing on. First he got a picture without sound, then sound without a picture. Finally, he had to read the manual. When the TV eventually did work, John couldn't find anything interesting to watch.

He turned it off and sat at his computer. He logged onto the Internet and visited his home page -- Archie Veronica Jughead III, the Meta Meta Meta Meta Dual parallel triangular search engine that searches other meta parallel search engines that search search engines. It was at that moment, as the advertisement banners were loading, that John's scales went tilt.

He typed "the" and hit return. The hourglass spun. The system locked up. The screen went black, then blue with cryptic messages, then the system shut down. John stood up and pushed his chair away. He left the room and began liquidating his lifestyle.

Now, his truck was parked along the road. John stood at the edge of a clearing miles in. The sun hung a good ten inches off the ground. John walked until he found a clear spot against an oak, free of ants and briars. He sat down, but he did not rest his head. He glanced at his watch, twice. This might take awhile.