Drive to Provide

When Reality Collides with Spirituality, One Must Ask Her Creator the Single Vital Question She's Been Seeking an Answer To

"God, I know you will provide. But will you provide until you provide? Or must I drive?" the man asked as he drove his car beneath the over-pass, which he deemed his altar; the crossing between his world away from home. He was driving home. But Charlie Wasserman hadn't been pulling another late night at the office. He didn't even have an office at his place of employment: Jobs Worth Corp. Charlie was a dweller of the modern day cave: the cubicle. And on days such as these, he could not listen to the car radio. "There are enough voices in my head," he thought to himself. There were enough worries and voices to fill two heads.

He was not someone who you'd look twice at if passed by on the street. An everyday-man in every sense of the word. But beneath the ubiquitously ordinary looks was someone who'd always searched for more. Never seeming to find it and so he drove. Charlie always looks for an excuse to drive. In a city where most people live and die by their cars, Charlie is not the exception.

Charlie looks to his fuel gauge. His car is running on empty, propelled only by the warm gusty winds in the mountain pass. A warning light deemed, ‘low oil,' blinks conspicuously every few seconds. Check engine. Check wiper fuel. Check oil. Check brakes. Charlie's chariot of choice (or lack thereof) is a cola brown 1984 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, coupe. But as the logo read on the back end, it was now a ‘Cut_ass _____reme.' He never bothered to replace the fallen letters. The interior was a coffee color cloth. The kind that retains all kinds of smells and bodily odors. And Charlie's car was definitely not the exception to this rule. It is the rule to the exception. The car reeks of fast-food wrappers, crusty cereal bowls, and warm deposits of molecular human waste (i.e. farts) embedded deep into the seats. His doctor attributed Charlie's constant gas to his sadness. On the rarest of occasions when Charlie has the company of the opposite sex, he routinely blames the odor on the vents.