at some point in the recent past i was able to make peace with my love of driving. something about velocity and music hits me in just the right way and always has: ágætis byrjun in ninety degree streaming wind through all of the open windows late night/early morning on the empty loop connector as i got sasha up as fast as she would go. one of my fondest memories. never squared with the guilt i always felt about the act, which dovetails with another fond memory, though this one more bittersweet, of driving christine home after syriana and wondering how many people over how many anywheres died for each drop of fuel we were using. paralysis is what it was. in the final analysis, maybe i realise now, there's nothing to be done about it, living in a society with infrastructure done this way; and there's even less to do about the inhuman mechanisms by which it is all made possible. hope for the bad end we deserve.

one of the last times i got to see catherine i went with her to some crazy store in beverly she remembered from her youth so she could look for jewelry, a sort it turned out they no longer carried. she drove (now that i think about it, i've never driven her anywhere) in what was then her new car and gushed about the peace of mind her new acquisition was relaying to her. she used to drive her mother's grand cherokee when she had to drive us places back in the day, and i suspect that she had the same aversion to the act of driving i did, preferring her bike. infinitely.

she changed a lot in the interim, and i remember the nameless horror i felt on that day when she talked about driving around and around to clear her mind, no clear destination in mind, and filling up whenever she wanted to, because at the moment she could afford gas prices wherever they were-- and the nameless horror of another day, before that, where she talked about working for exxon as a petroleum geologist, trying to find the last of it, in all seriousness. it was a deathly, dead-butterflies-in-a-whirlwind, deep stomach horror that comes along nameless and unbidden, which some associate with the identification of a moral wrong. but where was the wrong, when nothing can be changed? there's an answer to that, and my stomach had it at the moment, but the point today is that i can't name it anymore.

and if i could, the recognition would be wasted because i am just as culpable. as soon as i was legally allowed to, i started driving to school, a route which was easily walkable and also a detour of minor minutes to my father on his morning drive out of town to work. he used to drop me off after i stopped taking the bus. but i drove there and home every day, sometimes making myself useful by providing rides to megan, who lived far from the school. a lot of the time instead of driving home alone i drove to other places of not much use alone: to the highway (almost) and back alone, for the road and the trees; to new hampshire, alone, for borders, the complete stories of franz kafka, and awkward, dreamlike conversation with the clerk about 'the hunter gracchus'; and alone to wherever else i used to go to think the long, long thoughts longfellow famously ascribed to youth.

in all that thinking i never came to the moral quandary that was haunting me as i belted out the dresden dolls on a thunderstormy evening drive to whole foods just a couple of weeks ago (26 days in july it rained, they said at the office), even though the answer, though not always the questions, terms, or conditions, would have been right in front of me if i had taken the clerk at borders up on her suggestion to read kafka's 'gracchus' closely, as i did just as i reached over to the small library i keep closest to my desk to check my spelling of his name:

'"i think not," said the hunter with a smile, and, to excuse himself, he laid his hand on the burgomaster's knee. "i am here, more than that i do not know, further than that i cannot go. my ship has no rudder, and it is driven by the wind that blows in the undermost regions of death."'

we all ascribe mythical status to the remembered statements of the shades of people from our past but, genuinely, that woman was a motherfucking prophet.