chill out Nebraska state trooper road movies

Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty made a record called Chill Out in 1990. Ostensibly, a mellow record to work a particular magic in the rooms it/they was/were named for at raves (Chicken? Egg?), each track blends familiar noises into the soundtrack of a night trip from Brownsville, Texas to the Eastern Gulf Coast in Louisiana. Bits of all night radio float through a sea of car engines, cattle lowing and Tuvian Throat Singing, of all things. It reminds me of times I've driven across country, usually with a girlfriend in some fluctuating state of me beginning or finishing being with them slumped in the passenger seat, so completely exhausted that I have to rely on those same all night radio stations filtering through on the AM band from some distant location to keep me coherent enough to drive on.

Each time I've done this I always feel vaguely criminal; as if absconding with the car I'm driving that doesn't belong to me after stranding the girlfriend in a motel room in Biscuit Hill, Oklahoma or the Admiral Benbow Inn in Memphis, Tennessee is a good idea. I can't tell if this desire to run is just part of my make up or something I've picked up after years of running fearfully from adulthood.

I listen to Springsteen's Nebraska record and I empathize. I read my friend Neal Shaffer's graphic novel Last Exit Before Toll and I wish I could just disappear. I could easily walk out of my house and be out of Maryland long before anyone missed me or the car that doesn't belong to me.

This feeling is in deep contrast to my recent spate of responsible living and quite natural, I suppose, considering the adventures stored up in my mind that I can't quite seem to let go of.

Still, as this criminal thinking is still dependent on some mode of transit, I think it's fair to say that there's something far less escapist about trains than cars. Perhaps it's the heavy regulation. This isn't to say that there's no adventure on trains, but I think that feeling is tied far more to voyeurism than to anything as real as driving a car away from where you are. The work isn't left up to anyone else and there is no reason one couldn't turn off their current path and start up another.

You can't be a criminal on Amtrak and you can't get far on public transit. This clean-livin' scares me all of a sudden.

workaholism

Two weeks before Thanksgiving my contract at the NGO I was working for in Arlington ended. The same day I interviewed with a new firm and was given a two month contract with a company that produces healthcare industry research and presents their findings to member organizations at large meetings. I design pages for the binders and publications presented at these meetings.

The job is monotonous in that the design isn't all that in-depth or complicated but I'm paid well and there are so many typically corporate amenities involved that I am willing to put forth in excess of sixty hours a week. They give us breakfast, lunch on Thursdays guaranteed, dinner if we stay after 8 pm, free beer on certain Fridays... Why would I ever leave? These are exactly the tactics I despise and yet I'm bought and completely willing to take that bait hook line and sinker.

So I commute 3 hours a day often on top of twelve to fourteen hour days. And I'm happy with everything about it. My life is improving dramatically. I feel responsibility beginnning to enter me and it feels good. I live in my own house. I pay my own bills.

Except...