I Am Buraot

The past year was my most challenging one so far. I was driving through life, beneath the figurative dark clouds and storms and all that. Stubborn as I was, and having no choice at all, I kept on driving.

I just kept on driving….

I was driving to work when I started learning new tongues. I then realized there is more than just the language that I needed to learn. I had to meet the people, the culture.

Now I yearn to go to distant lands and travel. Armed with my very limited foreign vocabulary, I plan on learning them firsthand.

On a traffic stop, I chanced upon a long lost friend who showed me the way to blogging. With it, and just like my friend, I rediscovered my long forgotten passion for writing. Consequently, I had to learn the basic stuff of web publishing. Most of the time, instead of simply writing, I always am entangled with updating widgets and the techie stuff that now it pains me when a day will pass that I haven’t had written anything at all.

Besides the technical stuff that I once considered geeky, I now experience the thing that I thought was alien to me, writer’s block.

The elaborate and massive but still congested California freeways led me to become familiar with the courts last year. Not because of my legal studies, but because of my incurred and seemingly endless moving traffic violations. I also realized that if you act like an arrogant prick inside a courtroom, the judge would send you to jail right away. As if a god majestically anchored in his bench wearing his powerful and mighty robe, he would come down at you glistening with a murderous look that would hit you faster than you could utter the words “yes your honor.” Even if you are only guilty of a minor traffic infraction.

I also saw that if you act stupid but innocently enough, you can pay your way out, paying fines that can be paid not right away, but in time. Mostly in a year. Even if you are guilty of driving without a license and without an insurance.

Well, it is pretty much like an 18 year old who, by law, is not allowed to buy alcohol but who is, coincidentally, legally allowed to purchase a gun. I guess sometimes, logic eludes me that I needed to shake my head several times.

Driving myself out of my incursions, I also experienced going to another school that most people dreaded ever so dearly. Traffic school. I was there several times that the instructor already knew which parts of my car needed replacing.

I also had a chance to buy my dream car. But before the year was finally over, it became a helluva wrecked dream of a car. I think it was the years’ last but quintessentially ominous sign of how I was driving not just my car, but also my life. Like it was that one final push, the ultimate surge, the final touch.

Maybe it was just the one final joke the heavens are giving me. If it was, it sure made me laugh. I laughed so hard that I never knew I was one-step away from certain death. It should have been my final journey, my last trip.

Nevertheless, I knew better than that. And that was the whole point of my amusement. Not that I am concerned, I just I knew it wasn’t my time. At least not yet. Besides, I have avoided meeting my angel of death numerous times that I don’t care anymore. I do know she is just around the corner though. Waiting….waiting… and hell, waiting.

Well, she could wait forever for all I care. I have planned to live forever. And I will die trying.

We all drive through life. This is our journey. Accidents we may call it, but if your time is up, you could either fight for it, or just face it and take it like a man. No worries, I will still push through with my planned road trip this year. You see, I wanted to go at it every year. Maybe I’ll drive as far as the East Coast this time. Or maybe head south across the Mexican border, I don’t care. As long as I drive.

Like what I did last year, I will continue driving, wherever the road might take me. Roadblocks are not an obstacle, I have faced them head-on before, and I, BURAOT, will do it again.

I am driving through life, and this is my ride.