GASOLINE DREAMS: ROADTRIP

A blast across the country is a lot like a week-long acid trip, and it will yield similar revelations. You'll go from paradiso to inferno and all the million purgatorios in between.

After the first 300 miles, time becomes irrelevant. You no longer exist as a person in a place, your life dissolves into a high-speed blur between points. You are everywhere, nowhere. Your body will mean nothing until you can't drive anymore.

Travel alone in silence for 500 miles, and your mind explodes like an over-wound clock. The features of the landscape influence your inner state strongly; emotions are busted gears rattling in your head, sometimes at full force.

A huge orange moon in a borderless sky will beam deep pleasure into you, you'll laugh loudly to no one, you'll become a lunatic. A lost dog trotting gamely by the side of the highway will feel like a metaphor for your whole fucking life and you'll drive the next 100 miles wiping your eyes, struggling to see what's ahead.

Music choices carry a risk. A dime-store Dante like you had better choose your Virgil carefully, you are fully exposed, you have no buffer, no armor. But you can, in fact, receive deep insights if you listen to The Carter Family as you go through the Blue Ridge past Clinch Mountain or play Mance Lipscomb or Joe Ely while crossing Texas. As a rule avoid Joy Division. You can rely on Chuck Berry to make you love your car, your country, your feeling of freedom.

If you have a companion, trust the road. It asks questions neither of you would think to ask each other. The road bond is eternal, it trumps everything. Dual witness is impact doubled. The remote motel and local food will delight; the overturned tractor trailer, no cops yet on scene, will horrify. Your private worlds will synchronize. You'll notice each other's strange little ways and habits against a strange backdrop. Getting along is less a matter of agreement than recognizing that everyone is already finding their way through the same unfamiliar country.

Biblical rains, electric storms, the southern spring, all types of weather in a single sky...nature is ignoring you. It's your job to pay attention and navigate all the forces at hand... seen and unseen. You can’t interrogate the landscape - you must enter it.

By the end, you will be right-sized.

And those men you see walking the highways, crusted and irradiated beyond any hope of spoilage?

They know they’re lost.

But they also know that if they keep moving, they’ll find something.