A Day in a Drive

The map above is a reference guide. The beginning of of the red line is approximately where the pictures begin. The last picture is taken facing the Astral Drive sign, where the red line stops. Handy.

A while back I did a little blog about my drive home from work, which I am really rather fond of, so yesterday while participating in my drive home it occurred to me that I might one day like to look back on parts of it again, so I drove a bit slower than usual on one small section and took 7 pictures. They are placed in order as they appear on my drive.


I feel some people take blogging as some defined activity, that must in some way fulfil a duty of entertainment value to any humble bumbly that might happen upon it, I simply don't agree. I think that blogs are so numerous, that perhaps one should possibly ignore the urge to blog about the new Nine Inch Nails record and instead cover the intensely specific. Such as how the light happened to look one afternoon as one certain individual navigated a white van through a canyon road with a cell phone camera hanging out the window.

I don't take work home with me, I've been quoted as saying that I don't take my work to work with me but that's another blog, and putting forth the extra effort to enjoy a short journey home is a big part of leaving work at work. I like to look for a route to and from my place of employment that packs in the most exciting and pleasing imagery possible, the kind of route where you see something new every day. I connect with sotres and houses and trees and hills, and checking on them from time to time then takes a certain amount of my thought processing power.

Where after leaving work one day I might have been tempted to continue to think about a call I ran out of time to make or an invoice I should have typed It's not long before I'll hit an interrupter, such as a new pink wig in the wig store window that I pass. I see the wig and soon I'm thinking "Wow, that would look really cool on Amy." Then I wonder "how much does a wig like that cost at that store."
The idea is to enjoy my free time of mind. To have thoughts that I would have for free. About things that would look good on the heads of people that I love, and stop thinking about things that I should only think about because someone pays me to. If a person has enough things like this in life, and their work is in a basic sense fair, then the transition from someone else's time to your own should be automatic. it goes like this: I'm thinking about work undone, then I see a wig, then I see a tree that maybe had a branch fall down in the high winds of the day, how windy did it get anyway? I bet it would be easy to steel that sign.

The Ivy on the side of this hill grows in solid for nearly 200 yards, it's about 20 to 25ft high. I had been taking this route for several months before I'd even noticed it. Now I wait for it, it's a favorite feature. When I see it I often think that my mother would probably go wild to have a big hillside covered with Ivy next to her house, and that my father would take a great deal of pride in the fact the Ivy is surly the best on the block. I don't even know if it's actually Ivy.

My small document of a section of a drive home and the thoughts it conjured ends here, at Astral drive, but somewhere at the top of Astral drive a trail is just beginning. I think about that trail often when I pass Astral Drive, I've never seen it, but I know it's there because I've seen it on a map. One day I'll have a blog about hiking on that trail, and there might even be pictures.