For the past year or so, I’ve gotten into this weird habit of going on weekend road trips consisting of me and my dog. The only reason I bring the dog along is that I don’t want to have to leave him with someone, because if I did, then I’d have to explain these road trips, and I don’t think anyone would understand. Hence anonymous confession. Guess I feel like I just have to get it out.
I get every Sunday and Monday off. Pretty much from Saturday night until Monday morning, all I do is drive. I don’t ever have a destination in mind. I stick a GPS in my glove compartment and just take off in whichever direction I feel like. Round about Sunday evening, I plug in the GPS and let it guide me back home. I never have any idea where the hell I am.
I don’t know why I do this. It’s like a compulsion. I love driving at night. I put the radio onto a soft music station – jazz, folk, classical, maybe even ambient stuff unless I’m really tired (in which case I’m afraid I’ll fall asleep at the wheel) – and let my mind drift. I love stopping somewhere in the middle of the night, maybe a cornfield or a rest stop or even a deserted parking lot in some godforsaken strip mall somewhere, and roaming around, looking at these unfamiliar surroundings. I spend a lot of time wondering about people who live in whatever town or city I’m in, even though I rarely know the name of the place I’m in. Sometimes I get a kick out of my dog peeing or pooping at one of these places, knowing that even after we leave, a little bit of him will be left behind. He marks the territory for both of us I guess.
I have friends but we don’t hang out too much. Most of them are busy with school or work or relationships or whatever the hell it is normal people do in their time off. Lately I’ve been pretty bored whenever I’ve hung around them. I seem to get more entertainment by eating alone in a restaurant where no one knows me, or having conversations with some clerk in a gas station somewhere. Sometimes I’ll go in a gas station at 3am and just see a single young woman behind the counter and I hope she stays safe; I wonder why she had to take this job, because no young female takes third shift alone in places like that unless they really have to. I like eating around strangers. I like wandering around stores in a nameless town, looking at the people. I love rest stops too; it doesn’t seem weird to be awake at any hour of the morning in a rest stop.
I guess more and more I feel like a stranger in my own life, which is why I feel most like myself when I’m surrounded by strangers. I’m not lonely in those situations because we’re all strangers to one another. They’ll never see me again and I’ll never see them. I like looking at them, thinking about their lives, and then being able to hop back in my car and drive away, not having to think about them anymore. I get to leave them behind, because in my own life, I can’t leave anybody behind, not really. It feels as good to separate from these strangers as it does to know them for a few minutes, to have some shared experience with them, like standing in line or eating somewhere.
Once in a while I’ll stop in a town that is well-known for something. Maybe a famous musician or author was born there. If I know who that person was, I like looking at the town from all different directions and putting myself in that famous person’s place, seeing what they saw before they were famous. I did that in Bob Dylan’s hometown, James Dean’s hometown, Sinclair Lewis’ hometown, places like that and a dozen others. Just small towns that would be unknown except for that person. I get some kind of lonely pleasure from that that I can’t quite explain, especially if it is really late or really early. Otherwise I don’t really care about that person.
When I get tired I’ll sleep in my car somewhere. I’ve never gotten hassled about it. That whole thing you see in movies, where a cop raps at the window and shines a flashlight in, that’s never happened. No one has ever tried to break in either. I like sleeping in my car. I feel free somehow, like my whole world can just be encapsulated inside that car. It’s simple, thinking like that.
But I like driving the most. I like thinking things over in my mind. I can be a thousand miles away but I’m thinking about something that happened back home maybe, or even something that happened halfway across the world. Usually I don’t bother listening to the news during jaunts like this. The only time I did was the night Obama was elected. I listened to MLK’s church receive news that he’d been elected, and I heard people cheering and crying. I didn’t care too much about the election but that made me cry too. It’s so rare to hear such unbridled, unrestrained happiness. Usually people are so angry about everything.
No one knows you on the road. You’re just another car. Something to pass or catch up to. I don’t wonder about the people in the other cars unless I’m somewhere deserted in the middle of the night, not having seen a car for an hour, and then I see someone driving. I wonder where they are going or where they just came from.
When I finally get back home again, I feel like I’ve been baptized and that the world is new. When I roll into town, I think about how everyone else has been sleeping or watching movies or fucking or whatever it is they do, while I’ve been hundreds of miles away.
I don’t know where this urge to wander came from, but I can’t help but listen to it. All my bills are paid but I don’t get to eat too much because I’ve got to pay for gas for these excursions, and that’s becoming more difficult with the price of gas. I don’t know why I wanted to admit this, but no one else knows about it so I guess I just wanted to get it out there. I wonder if anyone else does it. I wonder if I’m the only stranger in the world.