I’ve taken three long car trips this month–just back from one this morning– and I’m not unpacking because I’m heading to Asheville in a few days. Hours on the road means a few things — I once again have the lyrics down stone cold down to A Night at the Opera.
I’ve had no less than eight conversations with convenience store personnel on the comparative superiority of Red Vines over Twizzlers so I am going to buy a bucket online because stores never have them; and I’ve been thinking lots and lot of thoughts that then evaporated within 3/10 of a mile, like raindrops from a windshield.
Sloop whomp goes the rubber arms, busting each whole down, minus H minus another H, minus O.
There is an obvious connection between the cords and veins of highways on maps and the dopamine pathways of our neural concourses, so hell yes, it’s a good idea, your birthright even, Detroit medicine from your floorboard to God’s ears, to drive. Keep it moving, stay alert, pass on the right, eyes ahead.
Both unfold and flow if you’re lucky, stop either and you’ll cry and shake the steering wheel, but don’t forget you aren’t really those roads, you aren’t really anything, just a piece of tin moving to the west, pushing forward to home on autopilot. The car knows the way.
Whomp. Throw these streams of heinous nonsense (because this type of bad bigoted news is both, right?) off of my windshield and onto the mudflaps of the clay-caked long-haul semi barreling on my right.
I can’t tell if I am holding real guns in this photo, or just finger weapons, because it just gets blurrier when I blow it up. This much I can see: I know I loved cowgirls and I wasn’t a Girl Scout yet (though that would come and I would absolutely ace competitive badge acquisition including sewing and the pinker of the arts) and I think I was already a baby dyke, I think I was, just look at me, but I’m not sure.
Are you?
Honestly, I’m not Tea-Party-sure about anything, not anymore, but I’m this-car-knows-the-way-home-by-itself sure, and all things considered, I’ve decided to be content but a little skeptical with that level of certainty, to appreciate how these tires hug the road, but not to count on them. Hands at ten and two. Stay alert. Or at least pull into a Rest Stop if you need to nap with a T-shirt blocking your face from the weird, angled sunshine that always hits the interstate after a sudden afternoon rain.