[adam]

For a few years after I graduated high school, I still lived at home with my parents. We had moved to the neighboring town from the one I grew up in, the one all my friends lived in. It was about a fifteen minute drive between the two.
My first car was a 1979 Impala, a car that felt as wide as an aircraft carrier and about as heavy. I've had more powerful cars, but none that hurtled through space quite like that one did. I would drive out to see my friends and my girlfriend nearly every night, and there were these wonderful back roads you could take between the towns where it was unusual to see other cars at the hours of night I'd be returning home. The back roads were a bit of a gamble in that there was a train crossing that you had to deal with, whereas if you took the highway there was an overpass and you would never be stuck staring at a freight train moving slowly in front of you (or worse, stopping right in front of you). But I preferred the back roads because of the wide open darkness of them; farmer's fields to the left and right, no cars, few houses, few lights.
I had my first serious girlfriend around this time. We saw each other for just short of four years, and between trips to her house, and to see my friends, that was a lot of back-and-forths on those back roads. When our relationship ended, I spent a lot of time thinking about what the past few years had been like, and it struck me that those night drives were maybe one of the most important, valuable things of that time of my life. And that struck me as an interesting notion, something to think about with regards to value, because the context for these drives was that there were not important, they were the in-between bits that were necessary to get to the important moments. Supposedly.
But I always felt so good on those drives. In my beast of a car, with the new thrill of driving, with the cassettes that I borrowed from my girlfriend, Pretty Hate Machine and Ritual de la Habitual and Perfect From Now On and all the mixtapes me and my friends were constantly exchanging. I would often drive with the window open to feel the cold air full force. And I think there was a certain contentedness often associated with those moments, having either recently smoked a joint or fucked or both, depending on whom I had been with that night, and heading towards my own bed and comfort and sleep.
So part of me wants to romanticize these moments in the sense that I'm taking something that's supposedly the least interesting part of the night, and I'm saying, "Look, maybe these moments are way more important than we tend to think they are." But I know that all I'm really saying is that I really liked those things, the music and the freedom of driving. The distinction I'm trying to articulate is that I'm using this thing, this memory, as the foundation of my idea that there are all these moments that are supposed to be unimportant, that are supposed to be in-between the real moments, and they're the real deal. They're the precious stuff. But I'm aware that this could be spun as all I'm really saying is that I misjudged how much I enjoy driving at night with music on, and the idea that there are any interesting generalizations to be drawn from this is false. I'm aware of that, but I'm not sure that's all there is to it.

I wrote something that I liked about it, at the time. A short little thing, not really a story, not really poetry (I can NOT write poetry) about the in-between places. I can't remember it very well. I know I went through four characters, I think, a first-person singular driving at night, a second-person, a "he" and a "she", I think, I can't recall what each was doing but I know one of them was on the bus, one was on a crowded sidewalk, and it was very much about this idea of being present, of not missing these little moments because of their perceived triviality. When I moved out, I posted it online at a website I frequented and someone there told me she printed it out and kept it underneath her bed. I wish I had paid more attention to that at the time because I'm really proud of that, of touching someone like that, and I don't think I ever knew anything about that person. I've lost the piece, too, which irritates me. Maybe it's for the better, it's probably much worse than I remember. But after trying to do all this "serious" writing and coming up with a bunch of garbage, I wish I still had this throw-away casual thing that someone had cared that much about.

Anyway, this sort of all sounds like, "it's the journey, not the destination," right? I know. And yet, it feels to me more profound than that. Or maybe that cliche is just so familiar it has lost all ability to suggest profundity. Maybe I should take note of the economy of it and cut this off now, right? Probably. But I feel like typing.

There are other layers to this thing that has become central to me. Another critical aspect of it was my adventures with pot cookies, around the same time as these night drives, and for a few years afterwards. Now, I don't know if you're familiar with pot cookies, but they can be summed up as, "Holy shit." You can smoke weed all night and have no idea how potent baking with marijuana is. I know the first time I encountered it, we could not believe the high we got was from pot alone.
I did them on a semi-regular basis for a while. Among other things, they produce a deep sense of euphoria (for me - not for everyone, apparently). I remember a couple of those night drives (and yes, I drove on pot cookies, and no, I will not do so again. Apologies on behalf of dumb teenage me) under the influence, and I remember thinking, realizing, "This moment is perfect." This music, this instant, this time and place is exactly how I want it to be.
And then it happened again, another night, another cookie. And then repeatedly, though I only recall two distinct driving occurrences - the rest were at home, at the movie theatre, wherever I was when I was stoned to ecstasy on horrible-tasting cookies (brownies mask the taste better). (Aside: here's how to make perfect pot butter. Grind your weed in a coffee grinder to maximize surface area. Boil water. Add butter and ground weed to boiling water and keep at a rolling boil for twenty minutes. THC is fat soluble, but not water soluble, so it gets absorbed into the melted butter. Strain the butter-weed-water through cheesecloth to remove the plant matter. Put the butter-water in the fridge. The butter will rise to the top and congeal. Once it's hard, remove from the fridge, lift the butter out of the water, throw the water out and you have perfect, awful-tasting THC butter. Where was I?) Oh, right, the perfection.
The thing is, my father is a severe depressive, and when you grow up with someone with a heavy mood disorder you get used to the idea that our emotions are chemical. Some people seem to have an instinctive aversion to this idea; they feel that it's a reduction of our emotional lives. I've never really understood that point of view: Of course there's an underlying physical mechanism. Why is that a reduction?
My point, though, is that while I was used to the idea that there was a chemical basis for our emotions, I never really felt it until I noticed the trend of "this moment is perfect" pot cookie experiences. As soon as a noticed that this experience was repeating, I watched for it, and tried to examine it from within the confines of the moment, turning over the sensations as they hit me and looking for some sort of falsehood to them, looking for some sort of insincerity to them, evidence that this moment of pure happiness was chemically induced and this was different than a natural wonderful moment. I'm telling you, I could find no flaws in it, no hint that it was fool's gold. And I really looked. Repeatedly. I would stop, reflect, observe. I would try to describe. Examine. Dissect.
And so there was another part of The Idea: Perfection is mostly an internal state. We naturally tend to think of it as a product of our surroundings because most of our stresses have to do with things outside ourselves, but the evidence was there in front of me that if you are in a moment without hardship, whether that moment is beautiful or mundane only has to do with what is going on in your head. My drive home can be boring and a hassle or it can be sublime, and that is decided within my skull.
Now, of course it's very tempting to focus on the altered state and point to it as reason why these moments I describe are exceptional rather than normal. But I think they were only exceptional in the sense that they were repeatable, predictable, and intense: I think all of life is made up of moments not unlike these. Look, I have my hair cut really close to my head, so there's no good or bad hair days for me. They're all identical. I always look more or less the same. And it has always struck me as curious that I can look in the mirror one day and feel quite handsome and feel quite ugly the next, knowing that from an objective standpoint I look virtually identical. And I have certainly experienced other moments of perfection that have had nothing to do with anything I've eaten or smoked or drank. They have happened all over the place, at all times, and they are subtle and glorious and fleeting. And they do not have to do with some special convergence of events like, "Oh, I'm having a delicious meal and I just won the lotto and whatever." I'm talking about moments that have no external factors I can point to, but just become those instants when I can say, "I feel incredible and would change nothing about this." If you are averse to drug-induced examples, I think most of us are familiar at least with the pleasant after-effects of exercise.