Navigation

You know when you are driving to a destination and you pretty much know how to get there, but you definitely don't know any of the street names, or even the landmarks themselves until you are within a block of them? The kind of path that you could never give directions to.

And I don't mean the well-worn journey you know like the back of your hand but only by landmarks, like "turn right just past the dive bar," and "if you pass the middle school you've gone too far." I mean the kind of place you drive to with tension in your gut because you keep feeling like this is the right way but isn't it taking mighty long to get the where you're supposed to turn next? I am talking about the kind of pathway where you are always traveling at night and you are late and you have to pee.

So that tension in your gut ends up making you want to scream when you realize you've gone too far and need to turn around--or is it that you haven't gone quite far enough? You begin to feel like biting a hole in your arm just as you recognize the next landmark--a landmark you couldn't have named but now remember as you drive by it. You momentarily cease the desire to bite your own flesh until that tension creeps up your spine again within 45 seconds because yet again you wonder if you have gone too far. If only you had given yourself more time, you think. Or if only you had gone pee before you left. Why didn't you look up the specific directions, you are thinking.

This is the drive home I took tonight from the movie theater on the plaza in the town my parents live in. I didn't grow up here but I come three or four times a year now and because of some construction all the usual pathways are blocked and I find myself panicked every time I drive anywhere here.

This is also how I tend to fake my way through conversations with people who are smarter than I am, or who read the New York Times, or worse, the New Yorker, or who took liberal arts classes in college and remember what they learned. I glean from their expressions and the cadence of their tone how I am supposed to respond to whatever commentary they are making. I feign recollection of famous people's names. I say, "I have heard that name," when I haven't the foggiest clue of whom they are speaking. "I have heard that name" keeps me in the know without getting me screwed when I pretend to know something I don't.

A philosopher or two recalled from college, a few current events taken from the headlines of msnbc.com or All Things Considered while driving home from the library, a passing knowledge of hip hop music from skimming Rolling Stone before falling asleep in bed. I utilize surface sources like these to approximate a position on welfare reform or the apologetics or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But these conversations inevitably result in my face feeling hotter and hotter and me wanting to gnaw on my arm really hard until we turn to talk of parenting, or Indigo Girl lyrics, or the liturgical year. Ah, the safe streets of conversation, places I know how to navigate through safely and honestly.