Random Reminiscinces from a Road Trip (I tend to go overboard on alliteration)

Yesterday, after about 4 hours of sleep, I drove home. I picked up Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables to listen to. I like to catch up on classics that I'll probably never read while I'm driving; at least that way I've ingested them somehow. The book is very good and actually funny in places, Hawthorne's overwrought verbiage notwithstanding. But I had to turn on the radio or else sleep-drive off the road into a ditch.

When you live in one place for a while, you get to know the radio stations pretty well. You move past their surface features (country, Top 40, smooth jazz) and recognize their underlying quirks. They're like people that way. But it only takes one road trip to remind you that all radio stations are basically the same--and very annoying.

As you scan the channels, you notice distinct "types" of stations. There's the hip-hop station, where some girl is crooning to a funky beat about how some boy did her wrong, or how she'll do him right (all night long). Then you've got your local rock-emo station, where some guy (whose voice sounds like every other guy) is singing, along with his guitar, about how some girl did him wrong, or how he really wants to plant her a garden in heaven so he can be the biggest fan of her life. Sidenote: It would seem, from these radio stations, that we really are making strides as a human population in knowing what the other gender wants. Guys want bootyliciousness. Girls want flowers and emotional support.

The ubiquitous Christmas station, playing Jingle-Bell Rock for the fortieth time that morning. How many people do a Christmas album and think, "Hey, I know! I'll be original, and cover Winter Wonderland!" just like the seven billion other people, including Karen Carpenter, who've done the same thing? The NPR-or-its-affiliate station, telling you in very straightforward, believable tones, about the most horrible things you've ever heard, along with some mildly interesting ones.

I should also give a shout-out, in this estates literature of the radio, the classic rock, oldies, 80's, and college radio, as well as the classical (at which I worked for a grand total of 2 months).

But I think the most irritating sounds on the radio, surpassing car advertisements, hyper morning deejays, and Rush Limbaugh, are the voices of preachers. Maybe they become more rampant during the Christmas season, but I probably heard clips from twenty different sermons on my way down--and it was just Monday. And why do most of them sound like they're from the Deep South?

Something else I noticed on my way down: Indianapolites put their Christmas trees on top of the buildings. I thought I was hallucinating it last year, when no one I'd talked to had ever noticed the same thing, and the next time I drove through, they were gone. But for real--I saw it yesterday. Some of the more impressive buildings in outlying Indianapolis have put lighted Christmas trees on the roof.

And, as a final note, I don't understand why truckers flash their lights at me when I'm not doing anything wrong and not trying to change lanes. I'll just be passing them in the left lane, driving quickly but carefully so they can see that I'm there but I'm not sitting in their rearview mirror, and once I get past them, they flash me. I don't get it, but it always makes me feel guilty.