A Loser In The Rearview

 September 21, 2026

   I give up. Such a loser statement, right? Not so fast. Check this out:

   The highest form of peace is to have no desire for admiration or even to be understood. My current goal is to do both. To simply let go of the striving. How in the hell did I get here?

   I'll tell you how.

   When I was a teenager I worked in my dad's gas station and one time I found myself holding down the fort, alone, in the office, sitting in a hardback chair looking out through the modern Phillips 66 floor to ceiling glass window at the expansive driveway with twelve gas pumps and a big sign that said, "Reg. 39.9". As I sat there, I heard a furious buzzing and noticed a very frustrated fly beating his tiny wings against the window, furiously trying to go through the glass and get outside to freedom. He wasn't alone. In the small planter at the bottom of the glass lay two dozen dead flies who obviously had attempted and failed at the same task. I don't know why, but I felt sorry for the little guy. All he had to do was back up two feet, go to the left and he'd go sailing right out the open door to freedom. But even when I got up and went over to him and tried to shoosh him out of his predicament he fought me tooth and nail and went right back at it even harder than before. I heard the driveway bells ring and went out and waited on a couple cars and when I came back into the office, I noticed the fly in the window had expired and had joined his other hapless insect-bros in the planter.

   "How stupid could a living thing be," I remember thinking at the time (in my defense I was a teenager). How pompous that sounds to me now, having spent the last six decades beating furiously against the glass of artistic and publishing success. 

   Then, the other day, I read this: "Sometimes, in order to go forward, you have to give up and go backwards. You can't advance, unless you turn around and get away from an immovable wall."  

   You know, just like that fly in the window at Al Bell's gas station on Route 66 back in 1963.

"Nothing can be gained without losing. Even the heavens demand death."

—Seneca