Trusting this shit more than all of the other shit (well, this combined with USA Today and Palmone), I’m voting in Wednesday. I left home a week ago Tuesday or nine days ago.

Nine days of thinking, writing (a bit, but not enough), looking, watching and driving. Just driving. Easing between the mostly white dashes on the road, easily passing and moving on and on.

My life has been subsumed by my driving self. I know this sublimation, this change, as truth, because all of the signs are there. Signs of me and my badass driving. How else to explain that Arlo Guthrie singing “City of New Orleans,” an ultimate railroad traveling hobo song, was the hold music as I waited for AAA to say they could yank me from the mud? How else to explain that this morning I jumped into the Beetle, tuned the radio and heard the Dead’s “Truckin’?”

But even as I feel more comfortable driving, I feel like a visitor taking notes from another world, another galaxy. It’s hard to explain, but with everything assaulting my eyeballs and registering slowly in the gray matter being so incredibly different from my physical reality, I cannot be anything but an interloper.

Like this:

By the way, after looking at the next picture hours after it was taken, I have to wonder. Wonder why Georgia O’Keefe did so many of those suggestive flowers evocative of female anatomy, but she never got above the waist.