After he retired, my maternal grandfather drove by himself (for fun) through every state in the US except Hawaii. He eventually got a Winnebago RV when he got really old, but for thousands of those logged miles, he slept in a tiny road-bungalow setup in the capped bed of a Chevy S10 pickup.

That’s hard as shit! I wish I was that tough!

My grandfather was an argumentative, stubborn, prickly person (and by multiple accounts, a real humdinger of a rat bastard) who did everything his own way to a massive point of fault. That road fever and the unaccommodating preference for doing things on his terms skipped a generation but gradually cascaded down to me.

True to that genetic endowment, I passionately love being on the road alone, skipping along dotted lines on the highway like a stone on a still lake. Provided my flow state doesn't get pinned down by traffic or cop holdups, I could just go forever.

Something that totally changes my disposition toward long road trips is having another sentient body on board. When I make plans to go out on the highway, I actively discourage people from getting in for any timeframe long enough to demand rest-stop intermissions.

When I was a brand-new freshman in college, I rode shotgun from PA to North Carolina with a middle-aged family friend who bumped The Rush Limbaugh Show on a repeating loop prior to the point in my development that I knew how to be assertive enough to make terrible things stop. For 8 hours, I was freezing cold from the blasting AC and too shy to ask for rest stops.

That horrendous experience imprinted on me on such a profound level that I swore I’d never do long trips in the car with another person again.

To this DAY, thanks to my inherited temperament and learned experience from sharing a dashboard with a bad match, I don’t ever want to adhere to anyone else’s pee schedule or be obligated to be a decent-enough person to entertain their preferences.

If it’s absolutely unavoidable that you come

• I’m driving, not you, and it has to be my car
• We stop when I’m ready to stop, not more or less often
• Vaping is ok, but you can’t smoke cigarettes
• No in-progress drug consumption, ever, because I don’t want to hear it from the cops if they stop us
• No whining
• Eating in the car is fine, but take your fucking trash with you when we get out or else

My parameters for even the faintest consideration for potential passengers is that they must be chill with my cop-repellant refusal to go more than 10 over the speed limit, headed exactly where I’m going already, conscientious but mellow and unrushed, likes the same shit coming out of the aux that I do, and is globally at peace with me calling all the shots.

A person who likes to sleep through the bulk of long travel has the potential to be fine, too.

That’s true neutral. I don’t like nonstop talking in my car.

This really makes me sound like such an asshole dictator to travel with. I know this. But I just skip the middleman and go alone because you can’t prove a negative; I can’t be an asshole to someone who doesn’t exist.

I claim and embrace my irrational inflexibility because long drives feel like a tremendous treat and I’m protective of that space. I don’t want anyone dropping my birthday cake and fucking it up.

Pack the car, we're going to Wally World

The last time you heard from me here, I was freaking out trying to manage an imagined but intense conviction that a monumentally-untimely Covid infection would force me to miss Fest. I’m happy to report back that I am still a Covid virgin and that (vax-required) Fest was the best weekend of my life.

A lovely, long round trip down 95 from the outskirts of Philadelphia to Gainesville (central Florida) bookended Fest weekend. I broke the drive down into 2 pieces: from home to Latta, South Carolina on Wednesday and Latta to Gainesville on Thursday. But I felt so good coming home on Monday that I did all 17 hours in one breath.

Bliss.

And something crazy happened at Fest this year: I found tolerable passengers.

Lone wolves, making things

So I think this isn’t exclusive to artists, but it especially seems to resonate with them: a lot of people feel totally alone on their drive, and they don’t always enjoy it the way I do since it’s not by choice.

Human beings are inherently- and necessarily-social pack animals, but the oppressive and antisocial constructs of existing in the 21st century (and even before that, in the 80s and 90s, which is as far back as I go as a person) mean most of life in America feels like real lone wolf shit.

I think probably all teenagers are lonely, a majority of young adults are often unhappily isolated (literally or spiritually), and if you’re one of the lucky ones, you might find your true people in your 30s or 40s.

Maybe!

In my and my friends’ experience, this loneliness especially clings pretty inexorably to artists in particular because we can’t mute our observable sharp edges to fit in quite as seamlessly as it appears to come to other people.

Also, mental illness is a tremendously salient problem in artist populations that persistently marches us at gunpoint right up to a cliff of desperate alienation.

We cope with that solitary feeling by leveraging alone time to get competent at making something - or at least, good enough to enjoy doing it as frequently as depression and/or going insane allows the energy for it.

Creating something new that we think is cool is a bittersweet little consolation prize for coming in dead last at the “fitting-in” game and perpetually being a man without a country.

If you’ve got those passionate, immutable edges and are more inescapably quirky, particular, and opinionated than other folks allow themselves to be seen as, you have to figure out how to be at least kind of ok with being by yourself most of the time.

Feeling like someone else gets it, really gets it, is distressingly rare. So to self-soothe, you learn how to keep yourself company and do your own thing.

You get used to it. What choice do you have?

It’s like being the person version of the super-specific, extremely-weird 1966 Czech New Wave movie Daisies that nobody’s seen while a lot of other people look from the outside like a sanitized, sexless 2022 Marvel movie with only one F-word in it to get the profit-protecting PG-13, engineered more to sidestep offending the least of us than to be a fulfilling piece of filmmaking in any measurable way.

But when you find a person who enthusiastically fucks almost exclusively with Czech New Wave?

Oh baby.

That kindred-spirit click can just ring that bell in your lonely little animal skull in a way that doesn’t ever stop echoing.

You wanna go for a ride?

I got stupid-lucky at Fest and picked up THREE of those kindred-spirit hitchhikers that rang my bell at different timbres.

I might generally prefer riding alone, but having any one of the 3 in this new space riding shotgun is as good as - or, holy shit, an improvement upon - a continuous solo drive.

It’s fun that these 3 passengers kind of have the ambient makeup of weed strains. Witness: CBD-dominant strains are primarily deployed for chronic pain relief, indica (“in da couch”) is relaxing and helps you sleep, and sativa is stimulating and drives euphoric creativity.

Remedy

My CBD passenger and I go back a long time, and he lives 10 minutes from me, but we hadn’t seen each other in years before Fest weekend because of Covid. There’s a long story here about him and me barely surviving Fest 2011 (mostly me) that I won’t get into because it’s dark, but he has been a profoundly pain-relieving healer in my life for 14 years.

He’s dropped everything to take me to the hospital, rescue me from stranding car accidents, and drive me to or from the airport multiple times. He’s a bathroom-cabinet staple that I’ll stock forever and do anything for because he’s protected me from the full impact of a lot of horrible pain.

I had a panic attack brought on by sleep deprivation on Fest Sunday this year and he took care to make sure I was safe and ok. After reconnecting with him on Halloween weekend, I’m confident I could drive him from PA to - and across - the Bering Strait to Russia if he asked.

Granddaddy Purple

My indica buddy and I had the most relaxing long campfire-style chats about music, writing, and arts collaboration at Fest.

His personality has the same ambiance of when you take a hot shower on a cold night, put on clean pajamas still warm from the dryer, and get under fresh bedsheets to rub your legs together like a contented cricket, drink Sleepytime tea that’s just the right temperature, and smile at your text messages.

Ahh.

That’s the most mellow, warm, soothing, and calmingly-fun person I think I’ve ever met. I just love him. Dude, spark a bowl (outside the car) and hop in.

Green Crack

I might be the most excited about the new sativa kindred spirit. Never in my life have I ever met another writer who is so profoundly my spiritual twin in almost every direction.

That is my soul in another person’s body!

He was my attached-at-the-hip Fest MVP and in the weeks since Fest, we’ve been playing at a huge variety of creative collaborations like we’re crashing a wine tasting and care less about the wine quality than getting lit.

I’m going to have to quit my job to do all these projects we want to do and/or have in progress.

HIGH STIMULATION. GOOD FUN. CREATIVE ACTIVATION.

We entertain each other to euphoric states with nuggets of fun turns of phrase to use later, freak out at the other one saying our own unspoken thoughts out loud, and “quick” conversations on the phone slide into epic all-nighters held as matinees.

Talking at length in the car is usually a no-go but Jesus Christ, I could do deep dives with this person cross-country and it’s so fucking exciting.

Homie PLEASE get in my car. I insist that you inflict yourself on my front seat. It doesn’t matter that much where we’re headed but I bet we’re going to the same place. Put your favorite record on the aux because I’m sure it’s one of mine, too.

The bell is banging 3 distinct but harmonious notes loud and clear, and holy shit am I pumped on where we’re going to drive together. Let’s make up a game with no wrong answers and play it all the way to Russia.

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