Night driving

As I drove home, the sun was setting. It's a beautiful time of year to see such a beautiful time of day. At one point there are a lot of almond trees just finishing blossoming and just starting sprouting leaves. In the golden sunset light, for some reason undoubtedly involving physics, their bare trunks seem to glow a soft purple. It's a total Monet rip-off.

As the sun continued to set and it got dark enough that I realized that if something ran onto the road I wouldn't see it in time to avoid it so I'd better turn on my headlights, the dimness and the headlights of oncoming cars reminded me of how much I like driving at night. The dodging of, and occasional impact with, unfortunate animals on the road is a downside of course, for all parties involved. There's plenty of kangaroos lurking in the bush, with supplementary amounts of wild ass and stray sheep, so you've got to be careful.

But that's a practical issue. On an aesthetic level, driving at night is like magic. Your car floats through space. Ahead of you, the twin tracer beams of red and white stretch out like a runway. When I was a kid and had to sit in the middle of the back seat because I was the youngest and we were all crammed into the car returning from a family holiday at the beach, I really enjoyed being able to see out through the windscreen. I'd see the reflected light, stationary in the distance but flicking past fast in my peripheral vision, and I would pretend that I was in Battlestar Galactica, in that glowy tunnel that they would lauch the Vipers from.

And as the night wore on and I gradually nodded off, all I could see was the dim glow of the instrument panel. The lights in the heater and radio switches, bobbing up and down in time with my sleepy head, rocking me to sleep.

If I was rich, I would always get someone to drive me around at night just before I went to sleep. Ideally I'd have a bed actually in the car, or perhaps the car could drive right up into my bedroom and roll me gently out onto my house-bed. It would be so soothing. I wonder if I can get REM to write a song about it?