.: a bit too tired to actually write a post, but I figured, before another day was lost (as Titus, “diem perdidi!”), I would make the gesture. Much driving lately, many late nights; seeing the world from the glassy theater-screen of my dear battleship-grey truck, realizing at odd moments just how liquid, and beautiful, the chain of lights can be… turning a traffic jam into a string of glowing electric jewels, the glowing scales of a gemstone serpent, snaking its neon body along the soft base of these dust-and-chapparel hills, on into the dreaming silence of the desert far to the east.

I find myself smiling to myself, while driving, of late: if you have seen Donnie Darko, the smile that he makes, that inward, self-conscious but knowing-something-you-all-don’t kind of smirk… well, that’s what it feels like (I have yet to have the temerity to examine this facial-expression in the rear-view; I am one familiar with the perils of a moment’s distraction while you drive). I don’t know exactly where it comes from, it’s very much the irrepressible smile that grows on my lips whenever I am on an airplane during take-off. But I suspect it has a lot to do with the potential inherent in travel, in the velocity, in the feel of the hard plastic ridges of the steering wheel beneath my fingers and pressing against the lower palm– and all the direction and control a steering wheel could imply.

Half drunk on my own motion, along the christmas-light studded palm trees and bold neon lights of route 8 in Mission Valley, I breathe in the air of all I ever dreamt California to be, and marvel that it has lost none of its miraculous essence. If anything, it has gathered more; or I fall into its exquisite densities and find the lost horizons inside its microcosmos. Either way– and at whatever level of magnification– something has not really changed, but been made more, perhaps like Einstein’s equation of mass as one approaches the speed of light. I am not quite there, of course, but how could I say that that is not the way I am going? How else would you describe this, with me, behind the wheel, the roar of my inline-6 almost drowning out Miles Davis on the local jazz station, the ocean behind me, the desert before me?