Yours Truly, The Commuter          

             Blood has a smell: sour, metallic, vulgar, almost imperious—not unlike the violence of which it is often a product. In a glittering wash of dawn-bathed gore which fouled the roadway in a wild arc of splatter, I was once reminded of this on my early morning commute to work. Stamped like ink into the asphalt, blood-smears trailed over a hill, tracing the polygonal pattern of tire-tread northward and beyond sight. One scarcely imagined that a deer contained as much liquid as the scene bore witness to. The impact must have been savage. What remained of the animal lay in a disordered heap of fur and flesh which had been haphazardly dragged onto the road’s shoulder in the minutes after the accident, its unscathed head protruding grotesquely from a pile of largely unidentifiable pieces of anatomy. The rest of the body, one imagined, had been carried off by whatever vehicle it met in its final moment, enmeshed in a tangle of steel grating and forming a kind of morbid crust as the twinned heat of summer sunlight and internal combustion dissipated through chromed slats. Drenched as my path was in a fetid mixture of the digestive and metabolic fluids which formerly sustained the creature’s lithesome form, I drove through this blood-steeped stretch of highway altered in some vague, unpronounceable way, my tires now tracking, too, the quickly congealing residue of the animal’s life as I drove toward the city.

            Ordinarily, there is a peculiar species of pleasure in long, meandering drives like the one I enjoy on my commute. Watching the procession landscapes through the glass and marking their unique movements—the singular ways in which the valleys and sandstone-capped hogbacks heave, plunge, and bleed one into the next—precipitates in me a meditative mood which I am otherwise unable to access in the course of my scattered daily motions. Along the mostly unpopulated strip of highway over which I travel on weekdays, I often lose myself in familiar music as I follow the Rockies toward Fort Collins. In my car, I am a mind abstracted, a whorl of iron and plastic and thought tearing across the outmost edge of the Great Plains—a land of wavering grasses which seems to long, as I do, for solitude and for vacancy—where I consider vaguely the vicissitudes of my place within it all. This kind of driving permits my entrance into a sensation of serene emptiness, of personal evaporation—a strange and restful feeling of disconnect which often approaches something spiritual. It is difficult to describe. I imagine, nevertheless, that this experience possesses some degree of universality out here in the American West where the sprawl of our relatively small cities, isolated by the pockets of wilderness that yet remain to us, necessitates our reliance on automobiles. These moments, like long-drawn breaths, offer a retreat from the erratic and disorienting clamor of life in the twenty-first century. The sadly anomalous quiet with which they are suffused gestures toward a past full of silences which have since gone extinct, their restorative powers lost to the inexorable march of progress and its noisy machines, now confined solely to the imaginations of lonely highway travelers.

            In years when I enjoyed more time for leisure and boredom than I now do, I developed a habit of driving winding circuits, extensive rambling courses which took me out onto secluded country roads and into the quiet places beyond the city—the county’s dark, unincorporated, sometimes abandoned land where one saw only by the speckled pallor of starlight. I was then, I think, in the midst of a search for something I never found. The whole bizarre and largely secret inclination of mine for this mode of escape from what were essentially easy and comfortable routines was in the end, perhaps, a kind of synecdoche for a youthful and inelegant philosophy of life on which I was swiftly losing my grasp. The cyclicality of my movements and their inability to reach—to even seek in some defined way—an end which was not also their point of origin was illustrative both of a fundamental futility of human action and of my unwillingness to confront a world which revolved on such an indifferent, seemingly inhuman axis. For these dawdling, wasteful trips into the countryside, I found music which seemed to meditate, however vaguely, on the ennui, the inexplicable weariness I then felt, albums which grappled with meaninglessness in a protracted slur of minor chords, hushed half-rhymes, and drossy little melodies. Among these was the record from which I have stolen the title for this essay. I did eventually and with no small measure of effort transcend the dull, despondent mood of those years into a state of mind which seems more genuinely contemplative and therefore useful, but my driving nonetheless still exists in a strange parallel with my general movements of mind. That I have drawn such a volume of personal revelation from an activity which has been possible for scarcely a century and accessible to someone of my socio-economic position for perhaps half that time seems worthy of remark.

            For me, driving paradoxically sustains a kind of ritualistic and violent encounter with modernity in the same instant it provides an intoxicating sensation of liberation from it. On certain days, slouching in a certain slant of morning light as it spills through the dusty windows of my car, I wonder if this encounter necessarily ends like the deer’s. I have often felt that I was born into a world I was not inclined to inhabit, “a hundred years too late” as a teacher once told me. I’m certain we all feel in varying degrees a discomfort rooted in the speeds at which we are now forced to travel and to live,  a haste precipitated by technologies on which our controlling grasp becomes increasingly tenuous. Perhaps the profound resonance of driving, as I have attempted to consider it, speaks to its work as a metaphor, to some kind of inevitability. If modernity prevents our rest, then we must propel ourselves forward, ceaselessly, into futures we must hope will be somehow less bleary and purposeless than the tiring, monotonous, feedback-loop of action which brings us inescapably toward them.