rainy evenings and the late night radio

*wiper blades, static*

*"..-uy now!, only at Williams Kia and Ron-.."*

*static, wiper blades*

*"..at’s why I asked my doctor about Singulair, the only type of-.."*

*wiper blades, static*

*"…that was gene mayberry and marvin wright, and you’re listening to nightside jazz and blues….hope you stay with me and keep me company, it’s the perfect quiet and rainy night tonight…if you’re on the road, be careful, if you’re at home listening, open a window and dim the lights…"*

For some reason I can’t stand listening to CD’s or MP3 players at night while I’m driving. It could be my favorite song or album of all time, but the second I start the car and begin to navigate through the sleepy darkness I have to kill it, and tune the old radio dial to something more…unpredictable, and liberated. Music I know and have recorded generates a sort of claustrophobia of the ears once the sun sets and I’m alone in my long black vehicle, and I think it may be a subconscious desire to tap into a network of mouths and ears; not a desire to have others with me, but rather a desire to be with others. To observe, from the shadows, their goings-on.

Rainy nights like this always magnify the urge. Perhaps it’s the smell, or the extra darkness that wet streets provide a driver, but I can’t stop tuning the dial until I hear something intimate; not an advertisement, or pop music, but a clean and calm voice in the dark. Usually NPR, or a quick bit by any of several late night DJs if I happen to catch them in between songs…and what is sought out initially for comfort and companionship, with the help of the damp smells and night tire splashing, turns into excitement and imaginative fascination in an instant.

I am assaulted with these imaginative flashes…much like dreams in the sense that they are vague in motive, yet specific in surprising detail; images of a kitchen, a porch, a man in a recliner next to a lamp reading, a woman standing in the frame of her back door in a bath robe while her dog attends to his business, a couple laying in damp sheets, gazing at a clock next to the shifting drapes– all coincedentally listening to the same radio station as I am, at varying degrees of volume and conscious attention.

I often associate my imaginative imagery with Murphy’s law, in a way…since what I consider is so broad in a specific sense, yet so specific in a broad sense, that the statistical odds of it having occurred, currently occurring, or destined to occur are almost certain. It empowers me with this sort of dream-like probe of the universe…randomly peering through windows of time and space, at objects and moments insignificant to their surroundings, and important only to me, the ghost of the old highway…