Apocalypse Service

Two very different moments on the drive back from Amy's folks' place in Escondido this afternoon in the world of $3 a gallon gas. First, cruising on the 73 toll road through Orange County, because everyone should have to pay for an Orange County existing. At one point all you see is the snake of the highway up and down the San Joaquin Hills, and since the traffic is so much lighter than on the 5, it's easy to imagine the day there will be no traffic at all. What a monument to late-capitalist pay-for-play this ribbon of road will be when the oil runs out, or just gets too expensive to buy. What of all these housing tracts that bloom like mushrooms, when they become frontier outposts in this nowhere carlessness (and that's not a typo) will make them.

Then, much closer to home in that stretch between Ventura and Santa Barbara when your mind says you're driving north up California, but the compass says you're driving west, and the setting sun ahead of you makes only you a liar. I have just bought the re-release of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and Byrne and Eno and company are pulsing their way through "America Is Waiting," its herky-jerk rhythm soundtracking the sun shimmering into the Pacific. "God it's beautiful here" is all I can think and absentmindedly accelerate as if to keep the sun up, the song playing.