I Should Not Have Been Doing This While Driving

Sushi is dangerous food

Photo by Fran on Unsplash

My knee was pressed hard up against the gray plastic steering wheel, my pants finding their grip on the dark grime left by countless previous renters of the 15-foot Uhaul I was driving. I was steering this way with my left leg so my hands would be free . . . to eat.

I know, I know—I shouldn’t have been doing this while driving.

But the move we thought was going to take three days was going on six and our nose was now up against the deadline to vacate. I’d already emptied the house several times over and every time I returned, forgotten closets would re-populate with warped tennis rackets, unpaired left shoes, family photos, and old files containing more dust than paper. Finally feeling satisfied that everything was in the last load, I jumped in the Uhaul cab to make it back across town in time to join my wife at a notary appointment that would complete the sale of our home.

I’d already gotten into trouble earlier in the week by skipping meals and letting my blood sugar dip below levels necessary for an upright person. So I dashed into the local market to get a California roll and I was now trying to eat it on the straight-aways while driving to the appointment.

If you’re a veteran traveler like me, you already know that sushi is a tempting and dangerous choice of road food. On the plus side—it’s a tasty, efficient, clean source of fuel that maintains its appeal without needing to be kept hot or cold on route. On the downside, there’s the cruel invention of the soy sauce packet. Deploying it successfully while in transit requires a deft degree of skill and care best suited to those with hands of a surgeon and nerves of a bomb squad captain. The engineers hired to design the manufacturing lines that produce these packets are instructed to make every 9th packet un-tearable using finger-resistant plastics, and just in case that doesn’t stop the consumer, to create the additional barrier of sometimes fully eliminating the pre-cut groove that shows you where to start the tear.

So there I was in the cab, having wrestled open the white plastic lid of the sushi tray and trying to convince the adhesive label that I’d actually need my fingers back in order to eat the food.

But then I picked up the soy-sauce packet, and of course, it was a # 9.

My hands were already shaky from the low blood sugar, so I really needed to eat, but did I dare attempt a forced entry of the packet while steering with my left leg and the sushi tray balanced on the other? But sushi just isn’t sushi without the sauce, right? So I used my multi-tasking juggling skills to isolate the activities of each knee, both feet in accelerating and braking, and both my short and long range vision to track the activity of the distant road and the close-up challenge of the sushi.

Success!

With the packet perfectly shorn now at the top right corner I paused and took a relieved breath before I’d carefully invert the condiment and let it drizzle satisfyingly over the double-sided row of sticky rice, fish, and avocado. Feeling fully like a mission impossible bad-ass, I tipped the packet over the slices.

But nothing came out.

Had I not torn deep enough into the packet? Or perhaps, did it just need a bit of an extra squeeze to coax the edible oil to flow? Wary that my decision to squeeze was playing right into the hands of the nefarious packet producers, I cautiously applied gentle extra pressure anyway.

Of course I made sure that the packet was pointing straight down over the sushi roll, but ah, some clever and advanced engineering had managed to innovate around the acquired skill of a traveling professional such as me, and the trick packet suddenly fully ruptured at a perpendicular angle to my pointing, and about a third of the container of soy sauce geysered directly sideways into my crotch.

After letting loose an innovative stream of expletives l remembered I was responsible for several tons of moving metal and composed myself. I had to make my peace with the fact that I’d be walking into a notary office and challenging both the receptionist and the notary to ignore the black spreading stains surrounding my fly and relate to me like a grown up who should be trusted to sign legal documents.

I finally reached my destination, parked the truck, and exited to survey the damage.

Brown is my last favorite color of clothing, which is why I only own a single pair of brown pants, and also why they were the only clean option remaining to me that morning when I got up to dress in the midst of our move. I’m so used to wearing jeans I had forgotten I was wearing them.

Looking down at the scene of the accident, the color of the soy sauce was an absolute perfect match for the color of the trousers and it was impossible to detect that I’d just fully doused myself with the liquid.

I started thinking about color in fashion choices and how everything other than brown is a kind of pretense or lie.

We wear white when we want to convey virtue and purity, black to convince people we’re bad asses that shouldn’t be messed with, or bright colors to give the impression we’re fun, exciting, or winning in personality.

But in truth, we’re all brown on the inside—each of us a mix of possible human traits, attributes, and qualities of character. If we wear our brownness in our personal expression and behavior, admitting the co-existing range of all of our parts, mistakes aren’t going to show up in glaring contrast to a deceptive image we’re trying to project.

Imagines that your future lapses of judgment or character, poor decisions, goofy declarations and confessions, hasty conclusions, fallacious arguments, inaccurate assertions, and inconsiderate utterances could all just blend in with the rest of your lovableness if you’re honestly owning the spectrum of colors that make up your hazel-hued humanness.

In fact, your mistakes might even look good on you.

Not that I think driving a Uhaul while eating sushi is something you should aspire to. In fact, despite the happy outcome, I really don’t think I’ll do that again.

Honesty always gets my attention. Not particularly someone who is honest to me, but someone who is honest with themselves.

~ Heath Ledger

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There are so many benefits to personal storytelling, chief among them, taking away more learning from our experiences.

When fun, weird, poignant, unusual or notable moments show in my personal experience I get excited to later write about them and unpack whatever is there to consider more deeply. I consider it a fun challenge whether I can create an entire article of a single small moment of experience.

Not all of these forays into personal storytelling make for the best writing, but the overall effect of a storytelling practice is that it produces your best living over time. Thanks for being a subscriber and reader as I pursue this experiment, and if you’d like to start a storytelling practice yourself, please send me a message and I can let you know what the options are. I’d love to connect.