July 2001

Night Driving

In my daily life I have always been who I am while always wanting to be someone somewhere else. My sure fire remedy for that is driving at night and kickin' back, Evil Robots style.

My original idea for this column was to list my favorite summer listening albums, but that idea fell flat when I realized that I did not care if you people did what I asked you to do. Instead I decided to write about night time driving.

Night time driving. As a child of the American suburbs, I think I am especially qualified to write about the thrill of driving a car at night. (Some have said that the majority of the content on this written by and for children of the American suburbs, and they are almost right.)

The moment I began driving a car I noticed that I was different - not in an after-school-special-prologue kind of way, but a just-visited-by-god kind of way. You see, I realized the first truth of cars - when you are in one, you are in your own world. The great attraction to driving a car for me was freedom. Yes, Freedom. Freedom from other people's lives, and freedom in my own.

I never cared much for driving during the day. In daytime, one is either going to school or work, and I am never excited about going to either. During the day you are also going home from work or school - with everyone in the world. In afternoon rush hour traffic, you are as much in the rat race as you were in the morning, the only difference being that there are more drunks on the road at 530pm than 8:30am - or so I am told.

So there you are, stuck at every stop light, and waiting to turn left against traffic, with a hundred or a thousand people no different than you. I found no joy in the day time. I was anonymous in the bad way - in the way you are anonymous to the IRS, or to the moon. The moon don't care if you are about to piss your pants, or if the commercial break on the radio is too long. The moon, the IRS and the morning commuters don't care if you live or die, so long as you don't make their day any longer than it already is.

But on most evenings, and weekend nights, I found a more pleasant way to drive and a more satisfying anonymity. In the solace of my dark car, under the cover of the night sky, and with no destination I drove my car everywhere. I was not always alone, but I never had much of a plan on a good night.

Driving down a lamp lit city street listening to Steely Dan or John Coltrane at 11 or 1 or 2 I was at liberty to become what I wanted to be, I was free to be no one or anyone. (No, not in the way The Smiths or The Pet Shop Boys do make one different, but it is quite satisfying none the less and you don't have to listen to crappy music.)

I have been doing this for the last ten years of my life. I don't always plan a good long night drive. Sometimes, it is on the way home from a ballgame, or on a trip to the 7-11, or on a night when we would pile into my 1981 VW Vanagon and drive around eating candy. The entire point of most of my greatest drives usually involves a hair-brained scheme, or the desire to do something for no good reason.

Sure, this is delusion and the feeling is fleeting, but the idea is pure. When combined, the anonymity of a dark car, a good groove and the apparently unending journey make the monotony of modern American suburbia quite a bit more tolerable. And on top of all that, I love knowing that I may be the only person on the road at the time who is going nowhere - literally. I love being aimless.

It is within the aimlessness where one finds pure liberty. I find that accepting myself within the context of nothing makes life in a world that, in the end, amounts to nothing, more pleasant. This has always been the case, but I had not always been able to understand it in that context.

You may have read in an Evil Robots issue recently an excerpt from an early text which Godzilla and I wrote about "Kickin' Back". While writing those texts we discussed for hours the value of aimless pursuits, whether they be in a chair with a remote, a liberal arts college, or behind the wheel of a convertible in the summer time.

Ah yes, I am around to my original subject, summer night driving. Of all the times in the year to be driving, summer is best. No other time can you drive for the entire day and night with the top down. No other time are people expected to smell like sunscreen. No other time of the year can you sleep in your car without a blanket. There is no better freedom than that because there is less illusion involved. Sure it only lasts a few months, but it is true and beautiful.

I can think of a few CD's I need in my car for those summer time jaunts: Gaucho by Steely Dan, Kamakiriad by Donald Fagan, The Mirror Conspiracy by the Thievery Corporation, Blue Break Beats Volume III, and The World is a Ghetto by War. Right now I could live on those sounds alone. I know that I am leaving out Earth Wind and Fire, Ursula 1000, Frank Sinatra and Nicola Conte, but my glove box is only so big.

So please, my beloved readers, take the time to enjoy your summer. Do not pay any mind to my silly hang-ups about life - go out and have a good time. Drive on, but don't drive too hard. And always remember that sometimes it is good if you never get home, especially if you can't tell anyone what you were doing - not because they should not know, but because the wouldn't understand.