driving home

Music: The Wrens: The Meadowlands It was still in the nineties like a blanket when I got into the car, and I didn't think to turn on the air conditioner on the short drive home. I was reading a friend earlier today who didn't think much of the Austin landscape, nothing remotely deciduous you know, and everything grows low, and scrubby, and may stay green or go brown but it doesn't fall off. And as I reared out the driveway and made it through the police barricade (some roadwork) I was noticing how the low lying trees gave good view, across the foothills in which the city sat, with large, elevated and curving highways and I was on one of them and it was dark outside and few of us were out there on the highway and I was heading due due east, and there was I think a glorious view (it reminded me of the cover of Jackson Browne's Running on Empty). Off in the distance beyond all the cars as I was driving and feeling like I was in a contemplative scene in some cliché listening to the Wrens (I'm still listening to the Wrens) there were bursts and flickers of lightning in the clouds, flashy reminders summer had come a month too soon. She's not really right, Austin does have its own beauty and maybe it takes doing three years time in a small town to get you to the point of appreciation, you know, but I've since met three people who still are down on Austin and I'm not so sure I get it; it seems so pretty in that Western way, although it is hot and there are annoying wealthy people and too many SUVs but its not so bad because I have faith there are more of us here. And then I had another one of those moments when I thought to myself I could keep driving, because this was nice, and pass up my exit and just go and go and go. But then I knew as soon as the album was over I wouldn't feel that way anymore. And I have to teach tomorrow, and meeting a new friend for lunch to talk about alchemy and poetry and rhetoric (maybe). So I should try to sleep through this, you know, the insomnia thing . . . .