It’s the time of night that most nights, you don’t remember. The ones worth remembering anyways, those are always the nights peppered with blank spots. Lapses in time where things happen without conscious documentation or recollection, they are proximate to those hours of the late, late night and early morning. It’s that time that I have always loved driving most. Cruise control. A highway lit up before you like some midnight rollercoaster into the wilderness. To the City up the 1, or all the way down the 101 through to LA; each bend and twist like a wrinkle or scar on the back of my hand, familiar to a comfortable approach. Caressing jawline turns with weathered routine, slipping out and back into autopilot just long enough to bring the speedometer down to 55. Around sharp side-mountain cliffs, up and down mountain passes. Engaged. And the mind is allowed to wander. Allowed to belt passion and pour with music played much too loud – in response to the whipping wind rasp produced by broken sunroof and back side-window. The kind of back side-window that pops out and locks like a little fish gill. Except now it didn't pop and lock; it just flailed helplessly right behind my head, like an untethered sail. The thing screamed like a banshee. And it was an awful-on-the-ear, pulsating thump of air that only got louder as you went faster. So you’re cruising at 65 or 75 or whatever you feel to be a rightful speed for so dark and forgotten in the evening, and the music just barely mutes it at half-volume.
Definitely not a quiet tune, that car. A bold character. It lives loud, and rough in suspension, and broken with its sunroof and side-window and duct-taped mirror. But that wild bull owns it, dusty grit-crusted white shell, sand-soaked interior and all. He owns the road, every turn, every speed trap to a tee, and in it I feel no fear. My eyes and hands follow the ever-farther luminescing line of yellow and white reflectors, with that instinctual bee-to-pollen feeling giggling in the background as the rest of my thoughts alight with hypothetical suppositions, and dreams and always wanderings. They dive deep into songs, breath held, hoping to find that clam with a tiny, perfect pearl of truth in it. Not every song has it’s pearl to be found, but maybe just some sense, some meaning , made-up even; a statement of definitive mind and point. You need to know the words, and when your only music selection is on CD, the words come to memory soon enough, especially for the good songs, you know, the ones that don’t get old.
And then when you get there, you’re never late, and always just on time, presently. You arrive when you arrive. It’s just before tomorrow’s dawn.
