The Road in Mind

There are times in your life -- Bob wrote about this in a poem he read onstage at Carnegie Hall about Woody Guthrie -- when your back feels completely against the wall. I don't think it happens for most people in a physical sense. You rarely feel do or die, really, with a life change hanging in the balance. But by the end of his poem and by the moment of truth for most of us, it's clear that the challenges pushing us closer to the border line aren't loaded guns or cold steel at our throat.

Rather, you're just at your end. People reach this point and quit jobs or break up with girlfriends or get divorces or move out of their apartment with a post-it note on the door to the asshole roommate, or whatever.

Bob's poem ended with advice. When you feel this way, he advised, you can go to the "church of your choice" or to Brooklyn State Hospital. He said you can find God at the church of your choice or Woody at the Brooklyn State Hospital. But he said, quoting now, "It's only my opinion, and I may be right or wrong, but you can find them both at the Grand Canyon, sunrise."

And I don't really know if I get there sometimes. Everybody's a little wrecked up from time to time. Artists paint, my favorite band no one knows keeps struggling along, endlessly destroying themselves and rocketing through the cosmos playing their hearts out while they dissolve like tablets in water. Real writers -- who write to live, not to eat -- probably sit to compose and feel breath failing in their lungs as the letters fill the page.

I'm a million miles from that. Nothing fills the lungs with oxygen, everything feels like choke in a bottle. Everything is pressing on and nothing's shifting for safe passage. Another writer asks why it always feels like I'm in an undertow. It does.

It's the scene, I guess, for the fantasy drive. On the fantasy drive, it's cool and the roads are carless. The vehicle is compact and it feels like a capsule or a pod rather than a car. I stop rarely and when I do I can hear my wheels cut into the asphalt as the speed decreases and the final movement of the tires sounds like someone approaching in heavy shoes.

The fantasy drive has no weather to speak of, but a coolness and open windows and no squinting. If it is overcast, then the rain, when it comes, will be perfectly attuned to the beat of the wipers and mists so the windows can stay down and the windscreen feels clear always. The air feels fresh, like life itself could take hold in the atoms of oxygen and nitrogen. The air finally enters my lungs, pushes in deep and floods every vesicle, every little floret of crusty tissue, shaking the dry collapsed edges of my disused organ. The rush of breathable, sweet air pouring in the windows lights my brain up like a beacon on a tower, spinning, scanning, suddenly anything but idle.

God, I need a drive.