the significance of stop signs.

STOP, it said, and so I did, and now here I am. Stop: there wasn't a clear reason to, just the sign's declaration, a verbal command that I obeyed and figure to recover from, sooner or later. For now the word is alive in my mind, in the drastic slowness of the air and earth around me. Articulation begets understanding, and it's as simple a trick as that, isn't it? Speaking aloud—in this situation, speaking slowly, wordfully to myself—makes things more complicated; articulating a thought is its own task, then there's the hearing, and the comparing of the what you thought and what you heard. They say a picture is worth x-thousand words, and they say it a lot, often enough that their words to this effect live in the front of my lobe. Clichés have truth beneath them, and here the implicit but indisputable truth is that language is the base currency. Words are the money; an image can light up your visual cortex and get an immediate, powerful emotional response, but that response has to be translated into words if it's ever to be parsed. Or take this stop sign just off to the side here. It's a lonely road, this one, abutted on either side by narrow, yellowed horse pastures, scraggly, second-growth fir tree forests bordering them. There's hardly a reason to be up here, this time of year, and so this stop sign marks what is an intersection in only the barest sense, the crossing of a rarely used road with one that's never used, not in winter season. But the sign spoke to me, in plain, unguarded language: STOP, and so I did, and then Simone did, too—her gas gauge has given out, it seems—she just sputtered into silence, and here I am. I'd no reason to leave breakfast as I did, save for the look she was giving me. But the look—utter disdain painted over with a shabby coat of tolerance; rather than admit there was little left to say, it foretold the coming shitstorm of pitiless opinion—the look was plenty. So I dropped a bill, picked up my glass of red beer, and walked out, across the parking lot to my shabby brown car, completely alone in its shabbiness among the shiny suburban monstrosities. Simone, you sweet old bitch, I said, pulling open the door and sliding into the cracked vinyl cockpit, be with me, now. Get me outta here clean; you remove me from this parking lot without requiring a roll-start, I'll take you for a nice drive in the country. Right now. You deserve it. You've inspired some looks on her face that weren't far from the one I just got over pancakes. I've seen them—seen her look at you as though you were something my Neanderthal aesthetics led me to, now strapped me to. But you coughed to life, and I drove, just out of town, then splintered off on a silent, narrow road that slowly inclines through the pastures and eventually meets up with the 159 up on the ridge. Miles upon miles from here. Miles of silence in either direction. I've been here … a while. Not too long, but a while, long enough to now be thinking about the world and myself in plain terms, but, still, terms: I think in language, I hear as words the footfalls of my plodding ideas. Stop.