[This is a post for premium subscribers as a thank-you. If you have donated or paid another way and want to read this, please send me an email and I can correct it]
One of the reasons I love being on the road is that I love being a nobody from nowhere, just another driver on the interstate, driving in tandem, following the rules of the road, alone together with the fellow travelers.
I see them at rest stops and service centers. I see them walking their dogs, cleaning out their trunks, eating fast food, or using the restroom. We smile, and we exist together, doing more or less the same thing. Not divided, not united; it just never comes up.
I like to drive for the same reason I got online 30 years ago: I ran away from life's complications.
I was once cast in a play, Amadeus, at Los Angeles City College Theater Academy right after high school, and I dropped out suddenly and disappeared, leaving a note on the bulletin board in the Green Room.
I would leave places when I felt like I was about to fall off a cliff, and I was afraid of something, though I never really could define what it was. I was just a runner. In my early 20s, I could not make life work. I applied to NYU and dropped out after a semester when I found I had screwed up my student loan forms.
I thought I had aid, but somehow I screwed it up, and I suddenly owed $7,000. I couldn’t pay it and not only that, a food plan was included in that fee but I was too ignorant to realize that and spent the whole semester starving as my classmates used their food cards to eat. I got jobs instead, but then, I was gone anyway. Back to LA.