Running on Empty

by Robert Phillips

As a teenager I would drive Father's
Chevrolet cross-country, given me

reluctantly: "Always keep the tank
half full, boy, half full, ya hear?"

The fuel gauge dipping, dipping
toward Empty, hitting Empty, then

--thrilling!--'way below Empty,
myself driving cross-country

mile after mile, faster and faster,
all night long, this crazy kid driving

the earth's rolling surface,
against all laws, defying chemistry,

rules, and time, riding on nothing
but fumes, pushing luck harder

than anyone pushed before, the wind
screaming past like the Furies...

I stranded myslef only once, a white
night with no gas station open, ninety miles

from nowhere. Panicked for a while,
at standstill, myself stalled.

At dawn the car and I both refilled. But,
Father, I am running on empty still.


I'm sitting alone in my apartment right now. It's a quarter to eleven and I just spent the last hour unsuccessfully trying to fall asleep. It's obviously not happening, so I thought I'd drag my bum out of bed and do some writing.

If this writing sounds a bit angsty, it's probably because I'm listening to my pandora.com radio station called "Girl Angst," which features fabulously tortured artists like Alanis Morisette, Avril Lavigne, Jewel, Tori Amos. And I'm listening to it in the dark.

So yeah, with all these hormones pumping through my veins, I've been feeling a bit...down. Feeling down, of course, gives me pause for reflection on the more depressing aspects of my life. So brace yourself for another downer.

I have this sense inside myself of emptiness. I think Emptiness first crawled into my being in my later teen years, probably starting at about age sixteen. At first I tried to feed it, literally, with lots of food. But that only left me with a lot of stomachaches and thirty extra pounds. Then I tried to fill it with braininess. And then I think I tried to stuff it full of sex. And of course, dispersed throughout this saga of Trying to Fill the Bucket With a Hole in the Bottom, I imagined the emptiness to be Jesus-shaped, and tried to shove that poor fella in there as well. But so far He's ended up being just as runny as everything else. Even marriage-- which, don't get me wrong, has brought me huge amounts of happiness--hasn't made it go away. So over the years my Emptiness has been labeled in a lot of different ways: hunger, ignorance, supressed libido, spiritual yearning, need for companionship.

And now I've got this ridiculous feeling that if I Only Had More Friends I wouldn't be so sad. If only I Participated in More Fun Activities I would be happier. So now it's been labeled loneliness.

But I don't know if that's really what it is.

Maybe Emptiness results from discontent. Those damn Buddhists, they always seem to be onto something. They say suffering comes from desire; I say Emptiness comes from discontent. But it's basically the same thing, oui?

But anyway. Does anyone here ever get that icky feeling that everything we're doing is all for naught? That we're just running around Doing Stuff in order to distract ourselves from the inherently empty and purposeless lives we lead? Is there really any sense in all of this?

Also, referring to another earlier entry, I'm still puzzling over the issue of how to love people. To really love them, not just force myself to pretend I love them, but really, genuinely care about and wish for the happiness of every human being I encounter. Is that possible? The Dalai Llama seems to think it is. Perhaps I'll report more on that later.

So this entry seems to be saying that maybe I should just become a Buddhist. Or maybe a Bahai with strong Buddhist leanings. (Speaking of which, Cotty, as I was trying to force myself to sleep earlier this evening, it occurred to me that you might want to consider the benefits of the Bahai faith in terms of raising a family.)