Thoughts per Hour

Headlights reveal a small portion of an empty road at night, the field
of vision in front of you and to the immediate sides of the road—the
white line, the gravel, the ditch overgrown with deceptive grass—and
you’re going so fast you can’t see a  tomcat prowling in that
ditch or where a jittery rabbit darts off, startled by your bumping,
roaring car, your 100-watt headlamps.

You can only see the moment right in front of you, not behind you in
the dark, not further ahead in the dark, nor from side to side; it’s
all dark in the country stretching out, invisible for miles.  The
only glimpse you have of something outside of yourself is what is shown
in the radius of a streetlight or the silhouettes from a house set
apart from the road, but as you go on, feet per second, mile by mile,
and speed past it, you only get the light, never what is in the house,
never who is in the house, never what problems go on there, or what
thoughts occur when it is time for bed or time to wake up or time to
sit down to dinner.  You’re just a stranger, illuminating moments
in succession, revealing them to yourself, and judging them against
what you know.

The road, the road.  You are traveling not just between places on
the map, but between the disunited states of your own being.
Behind is your normal self, for the most part, your job, your bars,
your facts of life.  But up ahead, where are you going?
Visiting family, old friends, or just an unfamiliar city where a
negligible promise is located.  And in those places you must be
someone else, who you used to be, assuming the false face of
I’m-fine-and-those-jokes-are-still-funny or slipping back into the old
speech, y’all, goocher, I love ya, Ma.  Pulling out the
mannerisms and worn-cloth attitudes you have long since left behind or
tailoring new ones that you think will be appreciated by the
half-smiling strangers…committing temporary suicide for a few days.

But on the road, you simply exist as distilled consciousness poured out
at seventy miles per hour.  The dotted white lane markers blip by
about as fast as your neurons fire, piston clank memories spark out of
nowhere, no hesitation, no inspiration, just the random combustion of
your previous lives.  Here, there, everywhere.  Anonymous to
everyone else on the road, you dream up an autobiography, mentally note
the evidence, beyond a reasonable doubt, that you are alive.

The radio is proof enough.  You are a slave to time and distance,
imprisoned within your sedan or coupe, but to the radio you are a
willing servant.  There is no control over it; it’s hard to
maintain any sort of mood while it plays, songs selected at the whim of
stocky DJs isolated in their whirring booths miles away, but from this
arbitrary flood of rhythm and rhyme you drink and drink, the singers
telling you what you want to hear, the chords dripping into your ears
and mimicked by your own heartstrings.

What can you find?  There are horrible pockets of this country
where radio is a shut-in old hag, staticky and fickle, yielding nothing
but bitterness, but on most stretches of the highway, if you scan and
seek with the appropriate amount of earnestness, you can find a wealth
of harmony.  The lonely snob who gets to play jockey for two hours
on Sunday nights and so he lets loose, giving you the nitty-gritty
bombast of B-sides and vinyl-flavored songs long thought lost to
history.  Or the mute conductor who just lines up the records,
arranges the needles, and pushes Play; she never says a word, just lets
the playlist speak for itself, daring you to find the common
thread.  These things happen.

And so you rock in your bucket seat, your own small voice croaking
inside a reverb curtain of an old sixties number or beating excessively
loud above a singer-songwriter’s slow ballad, driving past signs that
bear words but no meaning (because we know in our hearts that the exits
that are not our own lead nowhere) and ignoring the annoyed whine of
your engine, and the needle climbs inside your heart, 60, 75, 90…

What you are, what you can be: these things are easier to consider when
the stereo soothingly hums and the pavement carries you on its
country-wide shoulders.