Talking to Traffic

Leaving. I love the feeling of leaving, whether after destroying everything or making it all right—leaving is a sweetest release, a giant "fuck it! fuck it! fuck it!"

Arrived in Baton Rouge after a very long drive through the southern states at high speeds along wide freeways. Smoked seventeen cigarettes, drank two liters of Mountain Dew, a 32 oz green Powerade, and 72 ounces of various flavors of coffee and gas station "cappuccino."

There is no pleasure quite like that of driving a long distance by yourself. It combines elements of meditation with the unfoldings of constant stimuli, and as such, offers constant avenues for exploring the vast internal spaces of mind and thought, a compression of life itself, swinging wildly between tiny points, climbing from star to star on the suface of your mind's planetarium. One has no focus on which to project one's intentionality beyond that of the low-level reflex required to pilot the car down the road: no television, no music, no reading, no talk, no narratives, no point on which to orient one's considerations: your whole life is as open as you can make it be. Which turns out, of course, to be a surprisingly paltry set of spaces.

I think about my deceased father and his life of almost instinctive, migratory travel, flight to various nowheres via highway. His self-description centered on a penchant for remininscences, a nostalgic consideration of one or another episode in his complicated interpersonal life, his articulations always focusing on paltry mostly-imagined successes, always an obvious bulwark against some invisible body of unacknowledged failure. How did his thoughts structure themselves? Thoughts of friendships, churches, houses he would have liked to build, fantastical little semi-feigned scraped tickled and teased bits of passion toward one or another man-made phenomenon, courthouses and monuments; dreams semi-fulfilled at best, alternately confused and grandiose beliefs about himself and his life. Am I destined through my mistakes, my weaknesses, my own set of "confused and grandiose beliefs" to follow his irresolute dream-deferred life?

I follow thoughts of my father into a consideration of the past. At first, I think about the immediately proximate past: Boston, the trip with Darla, my life in California, the relationships I had when I was in California, almost all of which is dissolved now for better or worse in one way or another. Human entropy. I regret the part I play in destruction, but fear demands I move on.

Random thought: it would be good to take pictures of every weird town name or street sign that recalls some other, more famous place. For instance, Hollywood FL and Paris TX. I could really be a world-traveller in the limited sense of having a photo album full of smiling self-portraits in front of fake place-signs.

Random thought: At this point in my life, I am not inclined to imagine the future as it may have been; nor am I inclined to imagine it how it may be. My deep belief in failure demands that I do not stoop to the destructive release of fantasy.

What about the past? Last year on this night, I was happy. Full of a complex observant attentiveness: walking down my street at 2 AM, smoking and drinking coffee. The thunderstorms had blown over and the sky was completely clear, packed with stars. All around me, in each corner of the valley's bowl, storms of sheet lightning were still flickering silent in the distance, big flat flashes behind the mountain horizon. The weather was beyond perfect—summernight cool, not at all cold not at all muggy, layers of blended warm and cool going through the valley, fresh and still, a clear sky, and silent lightning in the distance from every angle. Walking down the road, lightning blinked through the sky; walking home, the mountains were flickering in the distance. The most perfect night I'd ever seen, and I knew it when I saw it. It is gone now but for a series of vague images and the resonant remnant of cool evaporation and electric air, the silence of cars on the highway. It is gone now.

After awhile, your driving-self degenerates to shouting and paranoid/hopeful speculations about the traffic. Is that BMW SUV going where I'm going? Why are we both going the same speed, side by side? Will we drive side-by-side all the way through Tennessee? What if I stop, will they stop later, and then in the morning after they stop and I stop and we both have started again, will we be beside each other again? And so on ad infinitum.

I've been on dozens of highways and through dozens of states. Why the elaborate parks on state lines? Who are they trying to impress with these elaborately maintained "Welcome Centers"? Everyone knows Mississippi is terrible.

Racist bathroom graffiti and oddly fetishized comments about the desirability of "black pussy" and "big ass."

Eventually you end up cursing and talking to yourself in tightening circular Rama Rama Rama spirals. Talking to traffic. Wishing it would storm so you could stop beneath the great square awnings of a gas station and feel the poignancy of rain falling, infused colors & smell of oil on the road, the heat dissipating and the summertime rain.

Driving into Louisiana, the clouds are pink and light and intricate; immediate though far away. Going where I'm going, I am incidentally chasing the center of a distant thunderstorm. An all-of-a-sudden awareness (all 'worth-it' things are sudden) comes: I'm driving down a perfectly straight road through a forest of tall heavily-boughed trees; I'm aware of it. A pure and perfect moment. The road actually presents itself to me as a "highway to heaven," as evil as such a phrase is: a thoroughgoing moment, complex, highly differentiated, durable, reverberant.