Author's Commentary
My friend is a pianist, and a fellow artist in that sense. He likes to sit down at the piano, and just play whatever comes to his mind
He calls it doodling. It's the same thing some artists do with pencils and sketchpads, just with the 88 keys.
This is just a literary doodle. Nothing serious about it. Don't look too far into it :)
Every time I looked at his fuel gage, on any of those many instances when he and I would take a drive together, I would notice something. It was always at least half empty. I watched him pump gas a few times. Even then, the needle would be leaning, just slightly, towards to the white E.
“Hey, James,” I said to him, once. “Why don’t you ever fill up your tank? I mean, what if we’re on a long drive, and we run out of gas, and we’re stranded?” He shrugged.
“We’ll figure it out when it happens,” he said, taking a sip of beer. It always bothered me that he drank while he drove. But I can’t recall a time we ever got pulled over. Or that we ran out of gas. When you get down to it, James wasn't smart, but he was a good, half-a-tank and beer-in-hand kind of guy. A real good guy.