CCTV 173, westbound. no. eastbound, doesnt matter, direction stops mattering once youve screenshotted the same postmile marker as many times as I have, and I have the count, I always have the count, this makes eleven off that stretch since April if you dont count the two I lost when the card corrupted (I still count those two. in my head. the corruption is not the truck's fault). Sixteen point six eight. Point two five miles west of Linden. The number on these cameras never changes and that is the whole point nobody wants to sit with me on, a fixed point they can put anything in front of whenever they need to. tonight it was the truck.

Two clocks on one frame, thats the thing nobody mentions when they talk about these feeds. the district puts its own little box top left with the route and the postmile and I dont know if thats a clock exactly but it reads like one to me, and then the real time burns in at the bottom the way it always has on these, and they dont agree, not by much, a handful of seconds, and Ive been told a handful of seconds is nothing (my brother in law again, hes an electrician not a systems man but he still has an opinion on anything with a clock inside it, and maybe hes right about the seconds, Im not arguing the seconds). the truck is the anomaly Im flagging tonight, not the seconds. that truck, marker lights strung the whole cab and trailer like it wants to be seen from space, doesnt slow through the frame the way the ones behind it usually do, and a car right on its tail with its brights doing nothing to close the gap, like the gap is fixed too. same as the number.

the glare pages are still up if anyone wants the mountain version of this, already ran the trucks-on-a-schedule argument over there and Im not running it twice, go read it. what I havent said anywhere yet is eleven times is not a pattern doing me a favor. eleven times is a pattern that knows I check that camera. I dont know when that stopped being a coincidence and started being FOR me, sometime between six and eleven I guess, didnt mark the exact one, anyway. its almost four and the truck is still sitting in that bloom of light in the frame like it got there before I did and isnt planning to leave before I do either.