Living In America Raw — Essential

The highway is a religion. You spend three hours of your life each day sandwiched between a lifted truck with a Punisher sticker and a Tesla whose driver is watching TikTok at 80 mph. Road rage is the only real meditation left. You flip someone off, then feel nothing.

Friday night you sit on a cracked curb drinking a tallboy. The sky is orange from wildfire smoke or sunset — doesn’t matter. A neighbor blasts reggaeton. Another screams at their kid. Sirens wail three blocks over. You think: this is it. The grind. The dream. The raw fucking nerve of it all. living in america raw

That’s America. Glorious. Brutal. Unmedicated. And somehow, still moving. The highway is a religion

And somehow, when the moon comes up over the power lines, you feel a strange love. Not for the flag. Not for the politicians. For the chaos. For the fact that you’re still here, still fighting, still broke but laughing at a meme at 2 a.m. with someone you love on a stained couch. You flip someone off, then feel nothing

You drive past a strip mall with a dentist, a vape shop, a dollar store, and a church in the same plaza. A guy is yelling at a lamppost about the FBI. Nobody looks. That’s the real code: keep moving, don’t engage, protect your energy.

At work, you’re expected to reply to Slack messages at 10 p.m. because “we’re a family.” Your boss talks about mental health awareness while denying your PTO. You smile. You cash the check. Half of it goes to health insurance you’re terrified to use because the deductible is a used Honda Civic.