Commute

I am driving about 25 minutes to work everyday and picked up a few audiobooks at the base library to listen to on the way.  The first, very appropriately, was The Road by Cormac McCarthy:

A chilling, bleak, gruesome tale of a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by few survivors of a cataclysmic event that blots out the sun, leaving mankind stripped of the trappings of civilization, and without humanity.  A highly effective narrative that stayed on my mind all day, an inky smudge in my thoughts.  Luke and I finished it today, listening quietly in the garage to the closing moments of the book.

My commute a la Cormac McCarthy: [Vanity Fair did a great parody of his writing style a few years ago "Cormac McCarthy Makes Pasta with Craig Brown", but sadly it is not available online]

The woman listened to the book.  She listened though she knew it would slightly ruin her day, like thumbing through old letters, calling up waves of nostalgia to feel those pangs of love, those pangs of sadness.  She listened because she had to.  She had to.  There were four discs in the case, each silver circle a circle like the moon, or the sun that now beat into her eyes.  She listened because the story gripped her heart as a father's hand grips a child's arm in a busy street, full of panicky strength.  She drove and she listened and she drove and she listened.

That word, she thought.  Must look it up later.

And the woman continued down the road.

Thank you, thank you...