Monologue of a Retired Highway Construction Worker from Houston

I miss the color of the cones. That bright glowing orange, so brilliant that it'll kill small animals if they stare at it for too long. I used to keep one in my bedroom, but my wife thought that was weird. It's in the garage now, with all the other barrels, cones, and road blocks that I loaded into the back of my truck the last day of work. In the evenings I sit in the garage and stare at them, move them around the garage. Sometimes I have to go out onto the street and put cones in the middle of the road just to feel normal. I love to watch people swerve around them with that surprised looks on their faces. I still have an old uniform, and occasionally I sneak onto the highway in my white 2003 Ford Supderduty Truck and put cones in the highway. I close off one lane, then two, then three, and watch the cars bunch up as they merge into a single lane, the men and women in their suits on their way back from work resignedly staring straight ahead listening to the news, or young proffessionals in business casual attire alternately swearing and anxiously tapping their fingers on the steering wheel. And then there are those people who try to cut ahead in the line. I hate those guys.

My wife recently suggested that I get a hobby. I've taken up model making. First I made some models of sports cars, A 68 Firebird and then a Ferrari Z8. Then a model 55 Ford pickup truck and on and on. Now I'm into SUVs. I especially like the new sport SUV's. Many of them come with minature white upper class families and little Whole Foods grocery bags.

I've found that these cars felt incomplete without roads, so I began to build roads, and soon I found that I had a minature city in my garage. Well, my city is mostly a network of highways. I thought it was nearly complete, but I keep building more cars, and these cars need more highways, and so I have to close off the highways for weeks to expand them and reroute traffic all the way around the city. And when those expansions are complete, I build some more model cars, maybe an H2 or something else marvoulesly impractical, and find that I need more highways. It's a never ending cycle. I'm in heaven.