Location: Healdsburg, Ca.
To know me is to know how much I love to drive. Bliss is an open road, a full iPod on loud and a 5-speed. When I dream of going places, I dream of going there in a bad-ass set of wheels. And when I dream of roads, this is the kind that make my heart beat faster. I've always been drawn to landscapes and I'm a big sucker for the way certain kinds of two-lanes wind through certain kinds of bucolic countrysides.
I don't think I'm ever so much at peace then when I'm writing at my keyboard or sitting behind the wheel driving through some place beautiful. No place where my mind is as sharp or as clear either.
I know I'm not alone -- you could fill a thousand iPods with a small percentage of songs written for the road, not to mention all the books and films -- but every time I hit a good road and a great song is playing on my stereo, I can feel the laughter in my heart, the buzz in my gut. Just pure happiness. Wish I could bottle that feeling and take it out whenever I'm stuck inside in the slow lane.
In a particularly rough time in my life, I started to drive around in the middle of the night. Sometimes I wouldn't leave my house until midnight and I'd often drive around in circles but I would stay out almost all night. I lived in LA and the goal was to see if I could stay out until dawn which is when I'd stop just to watch the sun rise over over the Valley or the Pacific or some freeway somewhere.
There's a certain kind of power behind the wheel of a car that everyone feels -- the being wrapped in a ton of steel kind -- and while it makes some people too damned aggressive, I always reveled in it. It was my layer of steel between me and the world, my way of doing and yet observing. Those all-night drives would end with me writing pages and pages of notes, trying to capture everything I was thinking about, ideas, stories, lines, characters. Sometimes I read those notes and I laugh or cry and shudder at them, but they almost always take me back to a road somewhere in the dark with music playing and the feel of my engine rumbling beneath me. And then I go looking for my keys.
1 comment:
Beautiful! If you want to see some pretty roads, you should see my commute to work. One day I'll drive up on the weekend and take few pictures. There is one spot where you crest a hill the world seems to open up and all you see is miles and miles of green mountains.... it's awesome! Even in the winter it's pretty bucolic!
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