Daydream Drivin'

Do you have an enduring daydream? One that gets you to sleep on the hardest nights, that fills the longest lines at the bank, through the ride on the crowded train, that pulls at your heart every time?

I want a red pick-up truck -- small, Toyota, standard transmission. I want it to grumble to life every morning after I crawl out of the back, where I keep my bedroll and my stash of books. I want to cradle a mug of coffee between my hands in a backwater diner, be asked where I'm headed and answer "Where the road leads me." I want to drive out of the closed New England valleys of my childhood to where the mountains are big and the sky is bigger. Where everything looks like this out my rearview mirror. I want to drive across the country by myself. I want to do by coming to each intersection and flipping a coin. I want to avoid highways and metropolitan areas, revel in the rural.

I lie down, trying to sleep, searching for something to soothe my crazy mind, and I come to this picture above all others. It's the freedom and the aloneness I crave, and also the exploration. It's my East-Coast-Manifest-Destiny-Neurosis. I first had it while I was still in high school and wanted out of that gray closed valley, and gray closed high school, more than I could describe to anyone, least of all my mother. Since then whenever my life feels like more than I can handle -- when commitments, relationships, and deadlines crowd my brain -- this is what I escape too. Someday I might actually get the balls to pick up and go -- but for now it's what gets me to sleep.