This is one thing on the road from Atlanta to Beachtown.

But it’s really near the end in the multi-hour scheme of things.
The very first thing you do as you drive onto the first highway on-ramp onto the first road that’ll start to take you back northeast, is listen to the good songs on Foreign Affairs, the Tom Waits album. You do this and entertain your own melancholy. Consider the relative insanity of driving hours and hours just to spend your life away from all the people you care about most, who care about you, to return to a place about which your feelings are mixed and where you spend most of your time alone. Realizing that this is probably the five-dozenth time in life you’ve experienced this. Surprisingly, this makes it easier.

The rest of the drive. You listen to the Nina Nastasia record On Leaving, twice, even though you’re not the sort to normally listen to albums twice. You drive the speed limit. You briefly entertain horrible scenarios like what if you crashed into a person coming out of that car parked on the side of the highway, and what if, when you did so, one thing you noticed in the woozy-nightmare moments just after, is that the person’s car is just papered with bumper stickers you don’t agree with? This would surely make you feel even guiltier and more horrible about the whole thing, somehow, like you planned it.

You listen to On the Beach, that Neil Young record, and you don’t sing along at all; you just notice that you never noticed the moment when the hills turned to coastal flatness.

You’re almost home when you flick on the radio and there’s this amazing radio special of audiodocumentary stuff told by soldiers of past and present wars. It’s Memorial Day.