Road Trip
PeacefulA lot of time is spent establishing the separation between what is inside the vehicle and what is outside. This is a very important distinction and will profoundly affect both the quality of the journey and its direction. Who stays in the car with you? Who whizzes past or jumps out? Sometimes the driver must wonder if he is whizzing past them or the other way around.
Sometimes the driver has to turn on the air conditioning. Heat, of course, indicates passion, anger, hatred. More important than the emotion creating the heat is the source of the heat. Is it coming from the car or from the sun outside? Is the engine burning out? Is the car about to implode on itself? Or is the sun just blazing on the black leather and shriveling our skin? The cold is no different. Cold and heat are equally painful in the long run.
Road blocks and accidents happen. Everyone is hot and cold. Everyone is good and bad. Nash equilibria are inevitable in every game we play, and we tend to avoid the extremes. Unfortunately, there isn't always a dominant strategy for both players in the game; that's what causes the prisoner's dilemma. If we both confess for causing the accident, we only get jail for 6 months each. But we rat each other out and get five years, that is the mutual distrust we have in each other's integrity. I am doing the best given what you are doing. You are doing the best given what I am doing. So we both go to jail for five years. Our cars have been forcibly broken down and we are placed in the body shop. When our time is done, we hit the road again.
The landscapes we pass through are important. Life is full of topographies. The mountainous regions are puberty, death in the family, divorce, illness; these regions are a long way up and a long way down, full of unexpected cravasses. Rolling plains full of wildflowers and sprawling cornfields are the good days that seem as if they never end, but always do. Those last few days of high school, the first days of an exotic vacation, the freshman year of college. And don't forget the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic Ocean is full of inherent contradictions. It is beauty and wrath at once. It can be a lover's embrace. Or it can dash your broken body on the rocks. Merciless. Everyone has their own Atlantic Ocean.
If there's a road trip, there is always a destination. Right? Some people believe in God, others believe in science, others believe in nothing. I am in no position to determine our destination (or lack thereof), because I can never choose from among the three options with complete faith. They are all equally convincing. I just drive in my own peculiar little vehicle down my own peculiar little path, and so does everyone else. The paths are not predestined - rather, they are makeshift - but sometimes they cross or merge, and you can see other cars traveling with you. For each vehicle hurtling through this universe and all universes, the destination is as unpredictable as the road.
Sentimental
Isolated
Amazed
