I am in the lobby of my hotel, waking up. The coffee is lukewarm. The breakfast is freezer burnt. And the overhead music playing is “Highway to Hell.”

You can’t get away from canned music. It’s everywhere. Like the IRS. Playing in public spaces just loud enough to hear the music thumping, throbbing, pulsating, lamenting, howling, crying, screaming, bawling, thrumming.

There are no old songs used for canned music anymore. These days, most canned music is young music. The kind currently being produced by kids who are barely old enough to buy lotto tickets.

Kids.

It’s hard to find silence anymore. Silence is not a thing in our modern world. The National Park Service’s Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division recently measured noise pollution and discovered noise levels have tripled in the last few years.

The roar of traffic, the booms of bulldozers. Whirring distant blenders, making smoothies. TVs blaring 24-hour news channels. Every 11 seconds, somewhere in this country, someone uses a leafblower.

But

canned music is perhaps the most aggravating of all these things. This piped-in music is constantly running inside supermarkets, restaurants, public restrooms, colonoscopy exam rooms, etc.

Per day, Americans are exposed to an averaged 76 minutes of “unchosen” music in public. Stores use this music to develop what businesspersons call “immersive branding” experiences.

The canned music tunes are usually ones you’ve never heard before, produced by artists young enough to be your grandchildren, with names like Rihanna, Ke$ha, and Lady Gaga.

You cannot avoid this music. The music is blasted in parking lots, public parks, and nursing homes. When you are in the hospital, drawing your final breath, Ke$ha will be singing “We R Who We R” overhead, and the nurses will be humming along as they wheel your body off to the morgue.

It’s gotten so bad that some stores are removing canned music. Many Walmarts…

I’m stuck in Nashville traffic. And so, apparently, is everyone else in the Western Hemisphere.

The main culprit here is the highways. Nashville’s highway system is a mess because these roads were built to accommodate approximately 11 cars, whereas there are currently 229 trillion Nashville residents.

So this is a problem. A big one. Because right now I am idling in a thousand-mile line of cars, stuck in a cloud of blue exhaust, and we are moving approximately one nanometer per hour.

I think I’ve figured out the problem here. The problem is, everyone is trying to use the interstate at the same time. Which is bad.

This is just common sense. If everyone in the world tried to take a shower at the same time each morning, the world would run out of water. It’s the same principle. A plus B equals C.

But the traffic problem isn’t getting any better. Because nobody is doing anything about it except buying more electric cars.

Tennessee Department of Transportation reports that, on any

average afternoon in Davidson County, there are strings of electric cars longer than the ladies-restroom line at a Taylor Swift concert.

“The traffic is really difficult,” says a friend who commutes in Nashville traffic every day. Each morning, he spends 120 minutes in his SUV, fighting hundreds of motorists just backing out of his driveway.

He wants a new job, but of course, there are no new jobs in Nashville, only new buildings.

Nashville is one of the leading cites for adding new real estate. In the time it’s taken you to read these paragraphs, Nashville has already built two arenas and one NASCAR súper-speedway.

The skyline changes almost daily.Things have gotten so bad construction-wise that as soon as one new structure is built, demolition crews arrive to tear it down so they can begin erecting a new Starbucks in its place.

This town’s…

It was late. I pulled into the campus after seven o’clock to attend my last class of the semester. My last college class. Ever. It was a night class.

In America, most self-respecting people my age were finishing supper, settling down to watch “Wheel of Fortune.” But I was in school.

I had been attending community college for 11 years. I had been taking a lot of night courses. Which meant that I had perfected the art of eating supper in my truck, on the way to class. I drove with my knees, ate with my hands, and controlled the radio with my big toe.

Supper often consisted of foil-wrapped tamales, purchased from Carmela, a middle-aged Mexican woman who visited our construction jobsites. Carmela traveled in a battered ‘84 Nissan Maxima that looked like a roving salvage yard.

Every time I’d buy a tamale, Carmela would pat my cheek and say, “Joo are very sweet boy, but joo need a bath, joo smell like goat butt.”

So parked my truck. I

rushed into class, smelling like the fundaments of a horned barnyard animal.

Eleven years it had taken me to finish school. Me. A middle-school dropout. My formal education ended in seventh grade, after my father took his own life with a hunting rifle. I simply quit going to school. I was a rural child. It wasn’t a big deal. Nobody seemed to care what rural dropouts did.

I got my first job hanging drywall at age 14. I started working in bars, playing music shortly thereafter. I had a lot of jobs. I hung gutter. I worked as an ice-cream-scoop. I was a telemarketer. I was a nobody. I was white trash.

Until I enrolled in community college.

I enrolled as an adult, and my life changed. I became alumni at Okaloosa-Walton Community College.

I completed high-school equivalency courses. I finished the collegiate coursework. It took me eleven years.…

These aren’t my stories, but I’m going to tell them.

Let’s call her Dana. Dana was going for a walk near her home. It was a dirt road. Her high-school reunion was coming up, she was getting into shape.

A truck pulled beside her. He slowed down. He rolled his window open, he asked if she needed a ride.

Something was wrong. It was the way he looked at her.

Before she knew it, he’d jumped out of the vehicle. She tried to get away. He overpowered her and threw her into a ditch.

She landed a few good hits to his face, but he outweighed her.

He used a pocketknife. He pressed it against her. She screamed something. She doesn’t remember which words she used, but she aimed them toward heaven.

Something happened.

His body froze. Completely. He was like a statue, only meaner. She wanted to run, but she was too scared.

That’s when she saw another man standing above her attacker. He was tall, with a calm face.

“It’s gonna be okay, Dana,” the tall man said. “Go on home, sweetie, everything’s gonna be

okay.”

Here’s another:

Jim was dying. A seventy-something Vietnam veteran with high morals, pancreatic cancer, and a two-packs-a-day habit.

Doctors said his cancer would kill him.

Treatments were hell. Jim met a man in the VA hospital. A homeless man with a duffle bag. A fellow vet.

They shared a few cigarettes. They swapped stories. They understood each other. Jim invited the man home.

The man stayed in Jim’s guest room. He stayed for several months.

He became Jim’s caregiver. He wiped Jim’s mouth after episodes of vomiting, he stayed up late during sleepless nights, he helped Jim bathe. He’d pat Jim’s back when nausea got bad, saying, “It’s gonna be alright.”

And he was there on Jim’s final day, too. He waited in the den while Jim’s family gathered around his bed.…

I was a kid. My father and I walked into the filling station. The bell above the door dinged.

Daddy was filthy from working under a car. He was always working under cars. He came from a generation of men who were born with Sears, Roebuck & Co. ratcheting wrenches in their hands. These were men who changed their own motor oil, who worked harder on off-days than they did on weekdays.

Old man Peavler stood behind the counter. He was built like a fireplug with ears. He, too, worked on cars all day. Except he did it for a living, so he hated it.

Daddy roamed the aisles looking for lunch among Mister Peavler’s fine curation of top-shelf junk food. In the background, a transistor radio played the poetry of Willie Hugh Nelson.

My father approached the ancient cooler, located beneath the Alberto Vargas calendar my mother warned me not to look at under threat of eternal hellfire.

The white words on the fire-engine-red cooler said DRINK COCA-COLA—ICE COLD. My father removed

the sensuous hour-glass bottle, dripping with condensation. Then he grabbed a plastic sleeve of salt peanuts from the shelf.

We approached the counter.

“Howdy,” said old man Peavler. Only it came out more like “Haddy,” because that is how real people talk.

Old man Peaveler looked at our items, did some mental math, and told us how much we owed by rounding up to the nearest buck. The old man’s cash register hadn’t worked since Herbert Hoover was in the White House.

We exited the store and sat on the curb in the all-consuming sunlight. There, my father and I counted cars. For this is what people did before Olive Gardens and Best Buys ruled the world.

Daddy used his belt buckle to pop open his Coke. He used his teeth to tear open the peanuts. Then he carefully dumped the nuts into the mouth of the…

Everything really is bigger in Texas. The sky. The hamburgers. And of course, the oversized tourist cowboy hats found in gas stations.

I sat in a bar located not far from the Dallas airport. There were several tourists wearing ten gallon hats that were roughly the size of traffic cones. I talked to them, they were visiting Dallas for a conference. They were from places like Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and the man wearing the tallest hat was from Yokohama, Japan.

When they exited the bar, the guys all walked out, single file, hats grazing the door jamb, designer tennis shoes squeaking on the floor like the senior basketball lineup.

“God love’em,” said the lady bartender, stifling a laugh. “Texas has that effect on people.”

It’s true. Texas does something to your brain. It makes you feel like you are a little bigger than you are. When you’re here, you get high on Texanism.

Maybe it’s the low air quality.

At least that’s what my cab driver thought.

“Texas is the largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the United States,” my cab driver said, doing 90 mph while keeping one finger on the wheel.

“If we were a country, we’d be the eighth-largest emitter of pollutants in the world.”

Well, what does he know? Maybe the air isn’t exactly pristine, but I remind him that Texas can’t be as bad as, say, Los Angeles.

“Yes it can,” he replies. “Texas ranks first among all states for total toxic pollutants released to air, land and water.”

Okay, fine. So I asked the driver why he still lived in Texas if this state has so many environmental drawbacks.

He smiled. “Dude, this is the greatest state on earth. There ain’t nowhere better than Texas.”

And that’s the general attitude of Texas. You will hear locals complain about it, but they gripe using the…