The End of the World

The end of the world. It’s a different place for everyone, but everyone knows where theirs is, although sometimes they don’t know how to find it until the moment they need it.

That highway calls to us, the highway to the end of the world. If you feel inside yourself, you’ll find you know instinctively where the beginning is. Sometimes, driving, you might have the sudden urge to make that turn, take that freeway entrance, and just go.

It’s not like the lure of the bridges; the bridges are something outside of you, coercive, malicious. The siren song of the bridges is to distract you, to trick you. The bridges, beautiful, old; they have no love for you, other than their love of your sorrow. Just walk across one, you’ll see what I mean, the water glinting grey and deep between the slats under your feet. I have the fear sometimes that a bridge will get me and then that last moment will be eternity, the fear and loss and the cold and the choking, the taste of mud and corpses and sewage, the bones breaking as I hit the water, regret and heartbreak and agony all rolling into one permanent instant as I wish I could change my mind about the bridge, about everything, walk back up the street for a pack of cigarettes, a shot of bourbon, cry it out, shake it out, scream it out, sleep it out drugged and curled on the couch, anything but experiencing that one last moment more than forever, because when time stops there can be no end of the world.

No, the end of the world is something inside of you, which is why all the bridges stay the same for everyone, but everyone’s end of the world is different. It may be only a few minutes from home, but usually it’s a long drive away. The end of the world is not danger, it is solace. It’s where you go in your mind when everything is crumbling, the place you long for when the steel band circling your heart is two notches too tight. You close your eyes and feel it calling for you, yearning for you, loving you. It wants you there as much as you want to go.

Down the street, a left turn, a slight right, up the freeway north, north through the city and past the volcano, past where the cooling towers used to be, through the small towns and the capital, past the religious nut with the billboard and past the 47-year-old Columbus Day Storm snags of trees jutting like broken teeth along the wind tunnel of the I-5 corridor, north into the riparian jungle, the wetlands and marshes, off the freeway and onto the highway, past the casino, off the highway and onto the winding rural roads that take you through the reservations and the small, small towns, north until you get to the place where you can’t go north anymore, and you get out of the car and walk through the trees to the spot where the water crashes against the rocks 60 feet below, and maybe you take a small object out of your pocket and throw it, or maybe you sit on the edge looking down, or maybe you don’t, and you know that in all this solitude, in all this quiet, your dirt and loss and all your pain will be washed away, washed clean and smooth like an eggshell, like the blank slate you imagine you used to be, and out here at the end of the world no one will ever, ever find you.


I don't think anyone wants much more of an afterlife than they want from this one; a warm spot in the sun, a garden, that moment of bliss when you wake up in the morning and sense that the warm body next to you is someone you love. It's when all that goes awry that we have to run, have to lock the car doors and piss in a bottle driving ninety up the rain-slick freeway at one am to get away, to get the hell away from the city and the bridges and the wreckage of hope. Or you run by pouring it out onto paper or into song or by pouring whiskey down your throat, or you run by fucking someone new but the new never quite stops reminding you that those brown eyes and that smile are not the brown eyes and the smile that you're running from, and pretty soon, no matter how far you run, you can't quite remember if you were running away from something, or trying to chase it down. 


That's why we need the end of the world, and that's why we need the wastelands and the bridges. The wastelands and bridges, their siren song scares us and makes us run, and the end of the world is the place where we get to stop. It's not the afterlife but it's close enough, close enough to let you sit down and catch your breath and try to remember whether you were chasing something or fleeing from it, and remember that the cigars and the bourbon and the tranquilizers and the sex and the running never did get you any closer or any farther away from whatever it is. And maybe you just take a minute, and that's all you need, but maybe sometimes you go to the end of the world and you never come back, and if there's anyone to talk to, you never, ever talk about why you're there.


Your heart’s on the loose
You rolled them sevens with nothing lose
And this ain’t no place for the weary kind

You called all your shots
Shooting 8 ball at the corner truck stop
Somehow this don’t feel like home anymore

And this ain’t no place for the weary kind
And this ain’t no place to lose your mind
And this ain’t no place to fall behind
Pick up your crazy heart and give it one more try

Your body aches…
Playing your guitar and sweating out the hate
The days and the nights all feel the same

Whiskey has been a thorn in your side
and it doesn’t forget
the highway that calls for your heart inside

And this ain’t no place for the weary kind
And this ain’t no place to lose your mind
And this ain’t no place to fall behind
Pick up your crazy heart and give it one more try

Your lovers warm kiss…
It’s too damn far from your fingertips
You are the man that ruined her world

Your heart’s on the loose
You rolled them sevens with nothing to lose
And this ain’t no place for the weary kind

(Ryan Bingham)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zelvaxvTaUk