The Journey Really Is Preferable to The Destination: A Short, Autobiographical, Contemperaneous Story 6/07

He drove along the road, sunlight shining down onto the hardtop, green leaves gilded auriferous by the sun. In looking at his oblong, rectangular rearview mirror, he could not only see those things he and his car had left behind, like the long, wide stretch of road behind him, but also his face, on which were placed his sunglasses and he could see more reflections through them, too. The road was on a manmade ridge that extended for at least two miles and that passed through an area thick with either trees or plains and open spaces. He had gained access to the road from a ramp a few miles back, one that led from his old neighborhood. Along certain sides of the road, there were a few stands and thickets of those tropical-looking, razor-bladed, top-flowering sumac trees. He drove straight for the road was linear itself and he played the music on his component vehicular cd player very obstreperously. The song was anthemic, the great "I Just Want To Celebrate" by Rare Earth, that had been recorded and released long ago, in 1970. Of course, this was forty years later. And the music coming out of most people's stereos was contemporary and it was then either rap or country and that was about it. It seemed like no one listened to good, listenable, real and pleasant music anymore-just crap. So much metaphorical excrement poured forth from contemporaneous stereo speakers. But not his. He hummed along with the music, and tapped his long, gaunt fingers on the rim of the circular blue-vinyl steering wheel. Soon, the song changed. It was replaced by "I Know I'm Losing You" also by Rare Earth-for he was listening to a seven-track Rare Earth compilation-but which had originally been done by The Temptations, yet obviously the two versions were vastly different; and besides, he didn't that he had ever heard the Temptations's version, anyway. It seemed the definitive and most incendiary and visceral rendition of the lyric was that performed by Rare Earth. There was a primal quality, a stark, stunning urgency to the music and it pounded and pulsated, like a great, rhythmic heart. It was the quintessential summer day: glorious, gilded and bright with aureate sunlight. Chiarscuro seemed omnipresent. Branches waved delicately but noticeably in the balmy sea-toned breezes. He had just dropped his bratty brother off at his seaside-appointed place of employment; not a culinary paradise, even though it was a restaurant; and had gone on an almost intentional tour of his past, as he skirted through fair Kittery, land and harbor, home and nation supreme of his youth. Part of that tour, that now, though he was still in Kittery, seemed almost concluded as he sped along the linear conduit to Eliot, Route One Bypass, in other words, yet part of that tour of memory lane had included a brief drive past his childhood neighborhood. Things had changed severely in that environ, and as he drove by at better than thirty, he briefly contemplated stopping and going up the hilly driveway and knocking on the door of his once-home, asking to look inside, saying he used to live there as a child, that he grew up there, and he thought all this as he stared up at the tan-yellowish facade of the apartment building in which he grew up. That however, had been more than five minutes ago, and a whole other song had been blaring stentorian from the speakers or "I Just Want To Celebrate"-the ultimate anthem of summertime and youth and happiness-had just begun to blaze and scream and pound, emitting, emanating from his oblong, posterior-located speakers. Often they created a pulsing wall of stentorian sound, something that was almost deafening and unbearable for the rear passengers; when there were rear passengers, that is. Thankfully, that was not often, so he could blare his music (good music, music that deserved to be, that should have been blared and broadcasted all around; unlike the other crap squirming around, squeezing out of tainted speakers nowadays) as much and as loud as he wanted to, and if the windows were down, then the obstreperousness of it had virtually no detrimental effect on him. The intrusive, reverie-disturbing noisy whir and roll of the rear tires came wafting in, and irritated him, bringing him out of his little reverie. Even turning up the volume would not help to drown out that awful sound, that faintly ominous sound. It was a noise that could only conjure up images of stalls and stops and crashes by the roadside. Horrible visions of being stranded alone and helpless even beneath the flawlessly, cloudless blue sky and the balmy, auriferous sun, with the dulcet chirping of treed birds all around him, and no help and one or both of his posterior rubbery radials fragmented and splintered. Paranoid yet not entirely unwarranted images like these flooded his mind, disrupting it, addling it, ruining his happiness, drowning out and concealing the demulcent strains of his music. Yet, he shook it off somehow. Perhaps by supplanting a memory or two from his childhood-the very memories that came flooding back so much, so often now, so hard and crushing, even the best and happiest of them. They were unbidden, involuntary and staggering in their power and realness. They had an almost tangible quality-they were even more powerful than sense-memories; perhaps because they were not composed of merely one sense, but all of them simultaneously, inundating and overwhelming his beleaguered brain with a terrific, detrimental surplus of data. Thankfully, in the midst of this deluge, he managed to maintain paltry but necessary control of his vehicle. Otherwise, his death would have been assured. An assured and honest event. Yet he had a certain amount of luck-as last night's brush with the local law had shown almost unequivocally. But that was another story. All that remained now was to arrive home, in Eliot, and leave the sweet, pleasant, semi-humble detritus of his past, and of fairest Kittery behind. Despite the fact that among other things, other acts, he longed to walk around his old neighborhood, roving across the breadth of it (or at least of it's outskirts) via the large sidewalks that fronted almost every yard and home in that area. But he couldn't; his day would be far too busy today. Too many things-few of them really fun or healthy or beneficial-to do. Though he was rather passive usually, this overstock of errands and activity had become a diurnal process now. One that, being quotidian, was far too frequent. But at least it got him out of the house, away from the charming but deadly computer-on which he spent way too much time; but then, didn't also his whole generation? A computer generation if there ever was one. He descended the hill, the one that had previously afforded a wide and grand view of the Kittery Traffic Circle, 7-11 and Dairy Queen and the beautifully-landscaped circular greensward in the midst of it all, and the swamps, hills and forests ringing it all, the one that now showed nothing but a screen of thick trees and bushes, with large and small thickets of sumac and single stands of sumac chiefest among them, and joined the artery of Route One, in the forked junction where the two disparate thoroughfares met, and headed along it, up it's rambling ramp, to home. From what and where was once his home. His home-his only true home.