Confessions of a Human Nerve Ending

Maze The low sun casts the dry, desolate San Luis Valley into a harsh, flat brown.                 I should be watching the road, scanning the horizon for cops, anything but drinking and thinking, smoking and thinking. Stop thinking.  Stop thinking.   Unshackled from my day job, I'm driving like some sort of '90s version of Hunter S. Thompson , "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs begin to take hold."                 Feeling strung out from the everyday madness of responsible life, I want escape from this increasingly bitter search for career and family and the rigors of being a American in 1998, and I'm not getting it.  So I light up and take a puff.                 Marijuana, pot, grass, kind-bud,...