wisteria

I’ve been thinking about my commute a lot lately; I guess because I find myself stuck in it a lot. Well, not “stuck”…it’s getting more and more manageable every day, and I think when I add up all the time I spent waiting for buses, riding on buses, etc., it’s about the same amount of time in both Seattle and Atlanta. The difference is that I could sit there and read in Seattle, and let the bus driver worry about traffic. It was multi-tasking at its finest—getting to work and finishing Time Magazine. Now, as much as I like to look at people around me and listen to music, I feel like it’s so much wasted time when I’m in the car getting from one place to another.

Another little quirk is that, since it’s been almost 4 years since I lived in Atlanta, my shortcuts don’t always work like I remember them working. Sometimes that’s fine, and I learn where something else is by accident, and sometimes, like last night, I end up driving an extra hour to get to where I’m going. Last night I ended up, God knows how, in East Atlanta, and waiting for the light to change at Moreland and Memorial, watched ten police cars and two fire trucks pull up to the corner. What was going on? I have no idea. It was a fairly sketchy corner with a liquor store, some sort of bail bonds place, and a restaurant that sells both Chinese food and Philly cheese steaks. Surely, any one of them could have been victim to the kind of incident that requires ten police cars and two fire trucks.

But it was fitting I saw that, because I was on my way to a Richard Shindell concert. Richard Shindell is a singer-songwriter that I’ve mentioned before (http://iwiggleitjustalittlebit.blogspot.com/2007/11/under-infidel-skies.html), and one of the reasons I like him is that he would have seen all those police cars and made a song out of it, probably with a misunderstood protagonist at the center of it all. But another thing I realized tonight, listening to Richard, is that he probably has the most songs about driving and being stuck in traffic of any singer that I can think of.

Driving songs are probably most commonly divided into two categories. One is the really joyous kind of driving song, something like “Life is a Highway” or “Drive My Car” or “On the Road Again,” the kind of song where you turn it up loud and speed up a little bit and are fairly happy to be alive. The other kind is the broken-hearted driving song, where you’re just so sad all you can do is drive your car and pray that you make it home before you drive off a ledge. I’m thinking of things like “Nothing but the Wheel,” “A Day in the Life,” “Thunder Road” when it’s sung really slow live, or “Everybody Hurts” but in that case, there’s really no danger of driving off the road cause Michael Stipe has completely stopped traffic to sing his song.

But anyways, Richard Shindell has all these driving and trucking songs that fall into both categories, but not necessarily either category. When I hear his driving songs, it’s mostly about how driving’s just a fact of life. People in his songs struggle to merge onto highways. They get desperate for a motel on a long journey. They talk to God. They listen to the radio. They deal with the rain. Sometimes they’re going where they want to go, and sometimes they’re driving away from who they really want to be with.

We get stuck in our cars. Some people make phone calls or turn up the music and never feel alone, but I think it’s so odd that driving is a time when we’re by usually by ourselves yet surrounded by all these other people. When I was little, I used to think that cars should come with display screens that would show you what other people in the cars next to you were listening to or reading, so that you would know if you had something in common. Really all you can do is see a bumper sticker and agree or disagree with what it says, or feel some sort of commonality if it’s a school or a cause that you happen to have in common. But you have to hope that all these people you don’t know you won’t hit you. You have to accept that everyone wants to get to where they’re going as fast as possible. We’re rarely more physically dangerous to one another than when we’re driving, but if you thought about that every time you got in a car, you’d go crazy.

I don’t really have a conclusion for all of this, and I don’t mean to say that all Richard Shindell songs are about transportation. He has plenty of other beautiful songs about interesting people in unique situations, but I heard him on a night when I had been stuck in my car for awhile. So here’s a Richard Shindell song about driving: