Drift Driver Quotes

We tilt our heads back and open wide. The snow drifts into our zombie mouths crawling with grease and curses and tobacco flakes and cavities and boyfriend/girlfriend juice, the stain of lies. For one moment we are not failed tests and broken condoms and cheating on essays; we are crayons and lunch boxes and swinging so high our sneakers punch holes in the clouds. For one breath everything feels better. Then it melts. The bus drivers rev their engines and the ice cloud shatters. Everyone shuffles forward. They don't know what just happened. They can't remember.

No way, man. I got one rule as a driver.” “What’s that?” “Never look in da rearview mirror.” “Never?" We drifted into the left-hand lane, cutting off a cab. “It’s not healthy to keep a’ watchin’ what you leavin’ behind.

Whenever you notice your mind wandering,” a fundamental instruction in meditation advises, “bring your mind back to its point of focus.” The operative phrase here is whenever you notice. As our mind drifts off, we almost never notice the moment it launches into some other orbit on its own.

You are a driver," he said, "and I use the word in the loosest possible sense, i.e. meaning merely somebody who occupies the driving seat of what I will for the moment call - but I use the term strictly without prejudice - a car while it is proceeding along the road, of stupendous, I would even say verging on the superhuman, lack of skill. Do you catch my drift?

The unforgiving November wind blows me toward the building. Pointy snowflakes spiral down from the cake-frosting clouds overhead. The first snow. Magic. Everybody stops and looks up. The bus exhaust freezes,trapping all the noise in a gritty cloud. The doors to the school freeze, too. We tilt our heads back and open wide. The snow drifts into our zombie mouths crawling with grease and curses and tobacco flakes and cavities and boyfriend/girlfriend juice. For one moment we are not failed tests and broken condoms and cheating on essays; we are crayons and lunch boxes and swinging so high our sneakers punch holes in the clouds. For one breath everything feels better. Then it melts. The bus drivers rev their engines and the ice cloud shatters. Everyone shuffles forward. They don't know what just happened. They can't remember.

I think you stop trusting your husband or your lover when you realize he has practically memorized each and every one of your reactions to anything and everything. He’s like a taxicab driver who knows every turn, every bump in the road, and knows when to slow down and when to speed up. Surprise diminishes and diminishes until it’s almost non-existent. You know he knows how you will react and plans for it. You no longer believe in what you see in his face and hear in his words. He’s drifted away under the camouflage woven out of your own reactions and words.

A fat tractor driver smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and occasionally nipped from a bottle hidden under his seat. At eleven each morning a cook threw scraps to four patiently waiting dogs. No matter what else was going on those dogs gathered by the kitchen door like clockwork. No wonder in that, thought Safiyya, the curs eat better than many of my own people. Horsemen rode fence lines every Monday, checking for breaks and rounding up stray cattle. Saturdays, around one, the workweek came to an end and many people drifted down the hill, in groups or alone, to shop, or perhaps visit friends and relatives in the nearby village. Some rode horses, some walked, a few drove battered cars or pickups.

But what about the spot brokers themselves? A few drifted to banks where they became traders or, more commonly, salesmen. Some simply retired or found work outside finance. Anecdotally, a number of them became London black-cab drivers. In around 2003 I met one who had done just that. I struck up a conversation with him as he took me home from the office; his name was Mickey. ‘I used to be a spot broker,’ he told me after he found out where I worked, ‘it was great.’ We reminisced for a while about the way the FX market had been, then, as we approached my street, he said, a little sadly, ‘But it had to end, we couldn’t beat the computers – they ate us all alive.’ We arrived outside my house where I got out and paid him. As he began to drive off, he slowed down and shouted back at me, ‘They ate us alive – and they’ll do it to everyone!’ With that, he turned the corner and drove out of sight.

With an obscure hesitation one steps into the day and its frame and its costume. Between the puzzlement and its summary abandonment, between the folds of waking consciousness and their subsequent limitation, is a possible city. Solitude, hotels, aging, love, hormones, alcohol, illness – these drifting experiences open it a little. Sometimes prolonged reading holds it ajar. Another’s style of consciousness inflects one’s own; an odd syntactic manner, a texture of embellishment, pause. A new mode of rest. I can feel physiologically haunted by a style. It’s why I read ideally, for the structured liberation from the personal, yet the impersonal inflection can persist outside the text, beyond the passion of readerly empathy, a most satisfying transgression that arrives only inadvertently, never by force of intention. As if seized by a fateful kinship, against all the odds of sociology, the reader psychically assumes the cadence of the text. She sheds herself. This description tends towards a psychological interpretation of linguistics, but the experience is also spatial. I used to drive home from my lover’s apartment at 2 a.m., 3 a.m. This was Vancouver in 1995. A zone of light-industrial neglect separated our two neighbourhoods. Between them the stretched-out city felt abandoned. My residual excitement and relaxation would extend outwards from my body and the speeding car, towards the dilapidated warehouses, the shut storefronts, the distant container yards, the dark exercise studios, the pools of sulphur light, towards a low-key dereliction. I would feel pretty much free. I was a driver, not a pronoun, not a being with breasts and anguish. I was neither with the lover nor alone. I was suspended in a nonchalance. My cells were at ease. I doted on nothing.

Government alone cannot restore the economy to health. Innovation is a primary driver of economic growth. One way of measuring inventive creativeness is through patent applications. Chetty, along with Alex Bell, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova, and John Van Reenen, studied the childhoods of more than a million patent holders, linking family income with elementary test scores and other key factors. Children at the top of their third-grade math class were the most likely to become inventors—but only if they also came from a high-income family. High-scoring children who were from low-income or minority families were no more likely to become inventors than affluent children with mediocre scores. Successful inventors were also less likely to be women, Black, Latino, or from the Southeast. Chetty called these failed inventors the “lost Einsteins.” “If women, minorities, and children from low-income families were to invent at the same rate as white men from high-income (top 20%) families, the rate of innovation in America would quadruple,” the authors said. The most ominous finding by Chetty and his colleagues was the effect of Covid-19 on educational progress. Using a popular math program called Zearn, the economists plotted the achievement of children from upper-income families versus those from lower incomes. When schools shut down and instruction switched to remote learning, children in the upper-income tier suffered a small drop in the lessons completed, but low-income children fell in a hole—a 60 percent drop in the rate of progress in learning math. The long-term economic prospects for those children are dire. “We’re likely to see further erosion of social mobility the longer this lasts,” Chetty said. The American dream was drifting farther out of reach for another generation.

The optimum image is the teak cockpit loaded soft with brown dazed girls while the eagle-eyed skipper on his fly bridge chugs Baby Dear under a lift bridge to keep a hundred cars stalled waiting in the sun, their drivers staring malignantly at the slow passage of the lazy-day sex float and the jaunty brown muscles of the man at the helm. But the more frequent reality is a bust gasket, Baby Dear drifting in a horrid chop, girls sun-poisoned and whoopsing, hero skipper clenching the wrong size wrench in barked hands and raising a greasy scream to the salty demons who are flattening his purse and canceling his marine insurance.

The snow machine drivers, dressed in layers of outer. wear to repel the worst the Arctic can deliver, may cover the full thousand miles without a good night’s sleep and with few hot meals. A bed becomes something they dreamed of once; a hot shower, only a memory. They develop shoulders the envy of linebackers. But when they try to explain the pale, empty nights on the ice of Norton Sound, or the northern lights so bright they reflect off the snow in the Farewell Burn, wistful looks come over their wind and sunburned faces and they drift into silence or stammering attempts at description. Many come back year after year, addicted to the trail.

A dog-it was a dog I saw for certain. Or thought I saw. It was snowing pretty hard by then, and you can see things in the snow that aren't there, or aren't exactly there, so that by God when you do see something, you react anyhow, erring on the distaff side, if you get my drift. That's my training as a driver, but it's also my temperament as a mother of two grown sons and wife to an invalid, and that way when I'm wrong at least I'm wrong on the side of the angels.

But there was one notable occasion when Gagarin refused point-blank to help. A mother wrote to him saying that her son was in trouble for cutting down a fir tree in a forbidden area at Christmas time. Gagarin looked into the business, found out that it had probably been more than one tree and that the young man was selling them off for profit. He recommended the man be sacked from his job. According to his driver, Gagarin became pretty angry and said, ‘What happens if everyone goes and cuts down “just one” fir tree? Where are we going to live then? Any day now, we won’t have anything left.’ Leonov puts this (and other similar incidents) down to Gagarin’s perceptions of the earth from space. ‘After his flight he was always saying how special the world is, and how we had to be very careful not to break it.’ This is a common enough truism by modern standards, taught to all of us in school, but what must it have been like for the very first man in space to discover it for himself? In April 1961 Gagarin was the only human being among three billion who had actually seen the world as a tiny blue ball drifting through the infinite cosmic darkness.

I love the wheels, I mean steering wheel.

Cam shot a glare at a driver in a bright red Camry in the lane next to his who was more concerned with her cell phone than she was in keeping her car from drifting over the line. “Neighbors said the couple used to fight. A suitcase was packed.

A blast of what felt like a Canadian wind had him hurrying to zip closed his shearling jacket and pull the collar up to protect his neck. He trudged through the drifting snow toward the driver’s side window of the speed freak, careful to keep behind the line of his cruiser in case any other idiots were on the road today.

One of the more useful things I learned as a midshipman at Maine Maritime Academy were the names of the seven masts of a seven masted schooner. When I mentioned to the 600 people in attendance at a Homecoming event that my degree was a BS in Marlinspike Seamanship no one laughed, leaving me in the embarrassing position of having to explain that actually I had a Bachelor of Marine Science degree. Later looking into a mirror I convinced myself that I really didn’t look old enough to have lived in an era when wooden ships were sailed by iron men. What I remembered was that we were wooden men sailing on iron ships that were actually made of steel, however I can remember schooners sailing along the coast of New England and I do remember the seven names of a seven masted schooner. In actual fact only one seven masted schooner was ever built and she was the she a 475 foot, steel hulled wind driven collier/tanker named the Thomas W. Lawson, named after a Boston millionaire, stock-broker, book author, and President of the Boston Bay State Gas Co. Launched in 1902 she held the distinction of being the largest pure sail ship ever built. Originally the names of the masts were the foremast, mainmast, mizzenmast, spanker, jigger, driver, and pusher. Later the spanker became the kicker and the spanker moved to next to last place, with the pusher becoming the after mast. Depending on whom you talked to, the names and their order drifted around and a lot of different naming systems were formed. Some systems used numbers and others the days of the week, however there are very few, if any of the iron men left to dispute what the masts were called. The Thomas W. Lawson had two steam winches and smaller electrically driven winches, to raise and lower her huge sails. The electricity was provided by a generator, driven by what was termed a donkey engine. On November 20, 1907 the large 475 foot schooner sailed for England. Experiencing stormy weather she passed inside of the Bishop Rock lighthouse and attempted to anchor. That night both anchor chains broke, causing the ship to smash against Shag Rock near Annet. The schooner, pounded by heavy seas capsized and sank. Of the 19 souls aboard Captain George W. Dow and the ships engineer Edward L. Rowe were the only survivors. Everyone else, including the pilot, drown and were buried in a mass grave in St Agnes cemetery.

I changed tactics and moved on to Plans B through F: Find something—or a combination of somethings—that paid enough for me to rent a place of my own. Dog walker, Lyft driver, waitress, cashier, sales specialist at a fancy spa. I drifted from job to job, finding that the fun ones didn’t pay enough, and the ones that did pay enough weren’t any fun.

A current partner told me that the organization looks for an explanation beyond the desire to leave because he or she may simply feel he or she has made enough money. That’s not acceptable, because it might send a message that money is the primary driver.

In the middle of a desert of ennui, an oasis of fear, or horror. There is no more lucid diagnosis of the illness of modern humanity. To break out of ennui, to escape from boredom, all we have at our disposal—and it’s not even automatically at our disposal, again we have to make an effort—is horror, in other words, evil. Either we live like zombies, like slaves fed on soma, or we become slave drivers, malignant individuals, like that guy who, after killing his wife and three children, said, as the sweat poured off him, that he felt strange, possessed by something he’d never known: freedom, and then he said that the victims had deserved it, although a few hours later, when he’d calmed down a bit, he also said that no one deserved to die so horribly, and added that he’d probably gone crazy and told the police not to listen to him. An oasis is always an oasis, especially if you come to it from a desert of boredom. In an oasis you can drink, eat, tend to your wounds, and rest, but if it’s an oasis of horror, if that’s the only sort there is, the traveler will be able to confirm, and this time irrefutably, that the flesh is sad, that a day comes when all the books have indeed been read, and that travel is the pursuit of a mirage. All the indications are that every oasis in existence has either attained or is drifting toward the condition of horror.

Sometimes I did things for no reason whatsoever except that they were there to do, and it went no further. I drifted into scenes through an open door and happened to stumble through, staying until I leaked out. I had no goals, so I stabbed in the dark figuring I'd strike something solid sooner or later if I didn't die in the process. (pg. 103)

The other stones began to shout. There was a noise of battle, and the cries of dying men and shattered horses. I shook my head violently to clear it, but the noise went on. I stumbled to my feet and staggered toward the edge of the circle. The sounds were all around me, making my teeth ache and my head spin. My vision began to blur. I do not know now whether I went toward the cleft in the main stone, or whether it was accidental, a blind drifting through the fog of noise. Once, traveling at night, I fell asleep in the passenger seat of a moving car, lulled by the noise and motion into an illusion of serene weightlessness. The driver of the car took a bridge too fast and lost control, and I woke from my floating dream straight into the glare of headlights and the sickening sensation of falling at