Closer

There I was lay­ing on the golden shag car­pet­ing in our liv­ing room, circa 1975 , watch­ing the ABC movie of the week (it was, I now know, a rerun). I was glued to the lit­tle 17” set with the hand turn knob that went “chunk” when you changed chan­nels by get­ting up and walk­ing over to the TV and touch­ing it and turn­ing the knob.

On the set was a ter­ri­fied guy in a fat tie dri­ving for his life in a square car through dusty Cal­i­for­nia Sierra canyons while being chased by a psy­chotic trucker. In the end the dri­ver wins some­how, but I don‘t remem­ber how. The cra­zi­est part was that the trucker was never seen, not even after he died. All you got to see was his quick mov­ing feet chang­ing gears and smash­ing down on the gas and then back to Den­nis Weaver (that was the scared guy, I now know) and his mus­tache swerv­ing around. It was so dope.

So I am dri­ving back from Red­mond to Bend today and the sun is out in the rain, which is always beau­ti­ful to me and I am sand­wiched between crazed truck­ers and I am swerv­ing and try­ing to run them off the road, and its all steer­ing wheel clutch time and mad­ness. And then I turn off at my exit for a latte, nar­rowly escap­ing with my life to write this for you tonight.

So (again, “so”?, I know, but it has to be this way) I am writ­ing this up and I think I won­der if I can find out the name of that awe­some thriller from way back when I was 11 and stay­ing up til 10. In about 3 sec­onds I find out that I had the right net­work, because not only do I find it, but I learn that Duel is the best-known ABC movie of the week of all time. That must be fate or someone‘s will or have mean­ing right? That is what we humans think when some­thing unex­pected hap­pens, that it had to be, that it‘s impor­tant, that I should pay spe­cial atten­tion. Or maybe I was a kid at the right time who fin­ished doing the dishes on a Wednes­day and caught a rerun of the most famous Movie of the Week of all time (!).