◆ PARALLAX

Long-haul driver. There is a stretch of I-80 where, more nights than not, the clock and the odometer do not agree with each other and have not for three years. I will note a mile marker and a time, drive what feels like twenty minutes, and the next marker says I have gone farther than the clock allows or the clock has jumped further than the miles. Always the same forty-mile stretch. I do not WANT it to mean anything, I want my log book to balance. Does this happen to anyone else on that road or am I just tired in a specific place?

Before anyone says missing time and abduction -- and they will -- the boring stuff first, because you deserve it. Microsleeps on a monotonous night stretch will absolutely produce "the clock jumped" without any memory of the gap, and they cluster on the SAME boring stretches because that is where the road stops giving your brain anything to do. That is not me calling you a liar, it is me saying the most dangerous reading of your own post is the romantic one. Please get checked for sleep apnea, genuinely, drivers get hit by it hard. If it keeps happening wide awake and rested, then we talk.

That is fair and not what I wanted to hear, which is usually how you know it is the right answer. I do run that stretch at the deadest hour. I will get the sleep thing checked, I have been putting it off the way drivers do. I will also start logging it properly -- marker, time, how I felt -- instead of just noticing. If it is microsleeps the log will show it clusters when I am wrecked. If it does not, I will be back. Thanks for the straight talk over the spooky version.