Take Off.
I recently realized that I’ve driven at least 500,000 miles across this country. Not counting the wild rides through Mexico, the poorly planned trajet routiers in Europe. I’ve owned five fifteen-person passenger vans that have all flipped 100,000 miles, if not more.
This was all a choice. To be able to do something I love. A lugubrious lifelong leap onto the two-lane blacktop. Tapping time on the steering wheel, while the tires keep spinning below. (Visions of Taco Bell have sometimes shaken me awake in my deepest sleep. A cold sweat accompanied by a deep-seated fear of badly refried beans, tube driven guacamole, seven layers of hell under chalky cheeses. Both stupidly delicious and deadly.)
We all make these leaps of faith through our world. Repetitions to achieve some kind of modest goal. There is nothing special about what I do — except for the troublesome taxes and the willfully parasitic culture of ego, id and superego. (Why did I just get hungry for waffles?)
We are all in this together.
That’s what you see when you’re out on the road. That’s the only brilliant moment in the mundane cycle we maintain — recognition of one another. We might all be heading to different destinations. But we’re all using the same searches for rock stations, the same daydreams at the wrong time, the same worn out infrastructure, the same mental framework to give us these endlessly modest mad skills. With the frost heaves, oil slicks, radial steel remnants, snow storms, wind storms, dust storms, tornados and rubber carcasses lining badly banked turns — I love them all for being such honest and true pains in the ass.
I’m driving to Downeast Maine in four hours. It’s a beauty way to go. And I am wicked stoked.