Some mornings you wake up and the abyss stares back from the bottom of your coffee cup. Other mornings, you wake up to find that some bastard has stolen a goddamn driveway.
I’m not speaking in metaphors. This isn’t some high-minded critique of late-stage capitalism eating our infrastructure, though Christ knows it’s doing that, too. No, this is the literal truth, a dispatch from the bleeding edge of whatever collapsed civilization we’re currently picking through. Down in Tennessee, a realtor named Paige Batten was trying to flip a house, playing her part in the grand Ponzi scheme of American homeownership, when she got a call. Some prospective buyer was on the line, probably wanting to haggle over closing costs or ask about the load-bearing walls, but instead, he asked a question that belongs in a Dadaist play: “Hey, what happened to the driveway?”
Let that sink in. The concrete—the place you park your over-leveraged pickup truck, the slab where your kids are supposed to draw chalk outlines of their imaginary friends, the one solid path to your front door—had vanished. Poof. Gone. Ripped right out of the earth.
The Great Tennessee Driveway Heist: Concrete Chaos Unpaved
I had to pour a tall glass of something brown and fiery just to process the sheer, magnificent absurdity of it. This is where we are now. We’ve moved past stealing catalytic converters and porch packages. We’re in the grand larceny of pavement. The thieves brought in heavy equipment, actual construction vehicles, and just… un-built a part of a man’s castle. This wasn’t some smash-and-grab; it was a premeditated act of geological piracy.
This is the kind of story that sends you on a savage journey straight into the paranoid heart of the nation. It’s a sign, a screaming red omen that the whole goddamn contract is null and void. We all operate under the gentle fiction that some things are nailed down, that the basic components of our world will be there tomorrow. The sun will rise, the taxes will be due, and the driveway will remain stubbornly, boringly, a driveway.
But no. The center cannot hold. The asphalt itself has become fungible.
Unpaving Paradise: The American Dream’s New Gig Economy
I can see it now, some crew of jack-booted thugs hopped up on gas station coffee and nihilism, looking at a work order and saying, “Close enough.” Or maybe this is the new gig economy. Can’t make rent driving for Uber? Start a driveway repossession business. It’s the final, logical endpoint of the death of the American dream: they’re literally unpaving paradise and taking it to a pawn shop.
This isn’t just a story about a missing slab of concrete in Tennessee. This is a story about the complete and utter breakdown of reality. It’s a psychic tremor. If a driveway can just disappear, what else can? Can they take your lawn? The oak tree your grandfather planted? Can a crew of rogue demigods show up and haul away the sky? Don’t bet against it.
This whole ‘wild ride’ started a long time ago, but we were too busy mainlining cheap entertainment and political theater to notice the foundation cracking. We thought the madness was contained to the glowing screens in our hands and the babbling heads on cable news. We assumed the physical world would play by the old rules. A charmingly naive assumption, it turns out.
Beyond Puzzling: Embracing the Existential Absurdity of Missing Pavement
The poor realtor was left “scratching her head,” the reports say, baffled by the “puzzling incident.” Puzzling? Lady, this is not a puzzle. This is a revelation. This is the universe whispering a dark secret in your ear: ‘nothing’ is sacred, and ‘nobody’ is in charge. You’re standing on the precipice, staring into the belly of the beast, and the beast is a concrete recycling plant somewhere on the outskirts of Memphis.
A deep dive into this kind of madness is the only sane response. You have to embrace the chaos. You have to laugh like a hyena at the sheer, balls-out audacity of the human animal. We’ve reached a point where the only thing separating your property from a vacant lot is the questionable attention span of a construction foreman. This is beyond politics, beyond economics. This is existential.
It feels like the whole country has gone off the rails, a runaway train loaded with explosives and driven by clowns, and now the tracks themselves are being sold for scrap. One day you’re worrying about interest rates and property taxes, and the next you’re filing a police report because your connection to the municipal road system has been stolen.
The Ground Beneath Us: A Savage Warning for Future Infrastructure Vanishing Acts
Sooner or later, they’ll come for all our driveways. They’ll come for the bridges and the monuments and the very idea that we ever built anything permanent here at all. It was all just a temporary installation, a sandcastle waiting for the tide. And when you call the cops to report the theft of the Washington Monument, they’ll just ask if you have a suspect in mind and if the monument had any identifying features.
Pour another drink. Lock the door. But don’t bother checking on your car. It’s not the car you have to worry about anymore. It’s the ground it’s parked on. While you’re at it, check out more Rants from the Bunker!
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