driving...

Driving. I’ve done a lot of it over my life. As a small child my mother would take my sister and me every summer to visit her family in North Carolina. With the roads as they were at the time… all crooked and twisting… it was nine hours one way there. I would lay in one of the back wells of the floorboard, curled against the warm machine… or even dangerously in the back window or more mundanely asleep on the back sit and I would fantasize about traveling someplace that would present me with a new life filled with people like me.

When I first moved away from home at 17 to go to college, I would drive the hour and fifteen minutes almost every weekend to see my parents. At the time it seemed long and somewhat daunting to travel so far alone. My solitary expeditions have, however, over the years increased in their duration and they’ve come to perform a function; enforced solitude, more than a moment alone with my thoughts. Providing in a way that laying in bed or being alone in a room isn’t able to fulfill. To be a car, or on train, or even in an airport and there’s no turning back and no easy means of contact with those I know, forces me into deep thought, to consider with an awake mind those topics I imagine getting around to but never quite making it. It becomes thinking for the sake of thinking, unrecorded, maybe to inform later, maybe not. It is solitary and meditative in a way that one doesn’t often have the luxury of. There is no guilt for this self-indulgent activity – it is driving, taking me somewhere.

My most recent venture was traveling between Cleveland, Ohio, USA to Banff, Alberta, Canada. 32 hours total drive time. I always wanted to drive cross-country just to see what was there. Two nights on a road where the pattern of all my travels becomes apparent – the substance of transitive space - a litany of non-descript restrooms and hotel beds, gas stations, quick stops, rest areas … this one preferable to others, this one less so… but all quickly forgotten. I am the driver moving from one neutral zone to the next. In the in-between I stare out the windows and construct narratives about the land and homes; narratives almost as fugitive as the alizarin sky of the setting sun.

Random thoughts while driving:

There is a division in the world between the educated (in a true sense of the word) and the uneducated; between the rural and the cosmopolitan; between the interior and the exterior. Politicians become their own separate class of personal compromise. The ends justify the means – whatever those ends may be.

Training vs. education

The nature of community and responsibility – often those – artists and politicians alike, who speak most emphatically about these topics, practice the most self-indulgence and will not claim the consequences which resonant from their actions. The ends of greatest commitment seem to be those of the self.

The land… how does one talk about the land? Through farms it is apparent… here too as much human as nature. Through the plains vastness and expansive skies, rain falling a distant massive wet billowing curtain arching in the wind.

Alone – one is never alone – the interior witness is always there and speakin