sonofableep

during my morning commute i was thinking about thinking during my morning commute.  since i live 100 miles from the office, i’ve got that kind of time.

used to be, i lived 10 minutes from the office.  but that was a different office, at a different studio, in a different town.  i regularly rode my bike and rejoiced in doing so (except when it started raining halfway through the day).  but the time came when i took a new job, and came to live 60 miles from the new office in a new town.  bike riding was out of the question, and i figured it was just cosmic yin & yang, evening things up for all those years of easy-commutin’.  at least my new job afforded me the luxury of driving off-rush-hour, and the trip was through beautiful farming countryside nearly the whole way.  it was 60 miles in as many minutes.  plenty of my co-workers drove longer to cover less ground, so i didn’t complain.

it was during this time that i began to master the art of death-wish-multi-tasking.  well, let me back up a sec.  in my past life as an amateur musician, i logged literally a couple hundred thousand miles of highway driving by the end of my 20′s.  so i’ve long since mastered the art of driving with one knee while eating / writing / phoning / typing / drumming with my free hands.  cast the first stone if you must, but i’ve now surpassed 400,000 miles of highway driving without incident.

anyway, during the years of my jaunty little 60 mile commute, it got to the point where i was doing a couple hours of solid work in the car every day.  driving with my left hand while using my right to plunk out spreadsheet & doc work on a laptop, or work through melodies & chord progressions on a keyboard, i usually got a leg up on the day’s work before i punched in.  and if i still had it in me, on the way home i’d wrap up any business left unfinished when i punched out.

and now it’s up to 100 miles.  but i still drive off-rush-hour, and my drive is even more serene than before – comprised nearly entirely of the rolling hills and farms of virginia, then west virginia, then virginia again, then maryland.  (also, i don’t have to make the trip every day, which contributes greatly to the bearableness of things.)  if the trip weren’t one big 5th gear open road free-for-all, i wouldn’t be able to use it as my Time Of Reflection.  it serves as the “chewing on the end of a pencil and staring at the ceiling tiles, deep in thought” part of my day.  so once in office, i can spend most of my time *doing*, executing whatever my brain has worked out while flying obliviously over all those state lines.

if all this sounds like absurdist rationalization for coping with a ludicrous situation, well hush.  it’s *working*, so don’t ruin it for me.