A Few Miles of Therapy

I fell in love with driving at night when I was a child. The road at night behaves like the narrator of a great story. It has an almost hypnotic method of keeping your focus and attention on a world encapsulated by the gentle glow of headlights. As the miles slowly pass, the main arc of the story is gradually revealed in the light beams, and the occasional side story is briefly featured in the golden glow of the sodium vapor lamps along the way.

Time seems to disappear into the shadows of the unknown world beyond the headlight beams. The solitary darkness always seems to imply a quality of unconditional forgiveness. I find it therapeutic to confess your sins to the sleeping world beyond the windshield, while the night patiently listens like a priest in a dark frock. It always offers a penance of more miles in exchange for absolution without judgment.

The timeless moments behind the wheel are filled with hundreds of discussions with a handful of different people in my head. I re-live moments and reconnect with memories and people from long ago as the hidden world outside my window quietly goes by.

Terrestrial Radio at Night – The Prized Ugly Sweater of the Night Drive

The radio dial in the small hours of the morning is a smorgasbord of unknown and retread DJs recovering from a failed vocations, and it’s a cacophony of inglorious beauty. It transforms the car radio dial into the roulette wheel of shim radio programming. Scanning the airwaves is the epitome of spinning the wheel, so I place my bet and punch the button.

Art Bell’s Coast to Coast Radio brings a whole host of alien abductees, conspiracy theorists, and the fringe into the passenger's seat. Some claim to have God as their co-pilot, but this evening Mr. Bell and his menagerie ride shotgun. It’s a guest pass to the secret society of after-hours, C-list radio programming to which only Kathy Griffin can do justice.

Scanning the radio dial during a night drive is wandering through a thrift shop searching for the most prized and most ugly second-hand piece of clothing. The right find from the thrift store can become the most regvolting and the most decadent, soul-satisfying piece you own. In that same vein, the appropriate retread terrestrial radio at night has that same treasured-catastrophe quality to it.

Tourist Traps and Greasy Spoons – A Treasure Trove of Heart Disease and Empty Wallets

After a sufficiently long enough penance of miles, the road throws its arms wide, and like a barker at the carnival of freaks, it offers its temptations of early heart disease and empty pockets in exchange for a moment of brief entertainment. The tourist traps and greasy spoon diners open all night sit on the street corners like prostitutes, bathed in the cheap glow of neon lights. There is an almost natural charismatic magic to them when a person has no other options for a bathroom break and a bite to eat.

The stale haze of fryer oil hangs in the air like cheap perfume in the greasy spoon. It clings to my clothes like body glitter from a stripper and becomes the souvenir of my bad food choices this evening. The harsh glow of the heat lamps artfully highlight the desiccated fossils and picked-over carcasses of once upon a time food from long ago. It’s a canvas which captures the essence of salmonella so perfectly and stirs something visceral deep inside me. While I'm not certain it's hunger, the single serving of Pepto in the car whispers its sweet lies of false confidence and reckless encouragement.

A true depth of greasy spoon haute cuisine can be fully enjoyed only with the proper vintage of stale coffee. Sipping, savoring and enjoying the nuanced tones of acrid bitterness, aluminum, and rust from properly aged coffee requires a sophisticated palate liberally seasoned with near lethal doses of sodium and cholesterol.

It is the feast of kings.

Across the way and awash in its garish spectrum of neon, is the obligatory tourist trap. It is a trove of treasure filled with state lottery merchandise, mass-produced mistakes and single serving, travel-sized wonders at prices which would make PT Barnum proud.

Much like Pokemon, one needs to collect them all in the name of keepsakes and memories.

Back from Whence We Came

I pump some gas back into the tank for the quiet penance of miles back home. It strikes me that gas stations in travel plazas must be religious institutions with the 10% premium per gallon of gas.

There is a small sadness which overcomes me as tonight's story of the road at night begins to wrap up, but there is also a broad sense of fulfilled peace which comes from this drive to nowhere in particular.

Sometimes the perfect salve for the soul is a few miles in a chapter of the story of the road at night.