When I drive, I get lost too much. I used to think because I never was much of a window-watcher. Even when my eyes are half-focused, trained absently on the melting blur of houses and cars and sidewalks, I'm thinking about something else. I daydream too much. As a consequence my brain fragments everyday images for nighttime. I'm too accustomed to the fantastic, I say tongue-in-cheek, but I'm not, not at all, and that's why I get lost. I want to find something marvelous, a place that's tucked away. A place I could write about.

I turn the corner will o' wisp, ready to watch for the next landmark, but somehow I'm skipping ahead. I think of ice cream parlors (Yogurt Parlor on Main Street, it's divinely small town, and I always order the same thing. Small, vanilla, with M&Ms) and video rental places (Blockbuster precedes a long line of near-identical burger joints, and Hollywood is across from Parker's, best place to get onion rings and hot fudge sundaes) American Fork sounds like something I've created. I list shops, funny dry spots of grass, the teeny-tiny brook across from the so-called 'general store.' I can't find my way around because I haven't grown up here. In the end, for all its quirks and story-worthy finishes, it is still just another place for me. Just another, and I turn on the wrong street, do a loop-dee-loop, spinning the wheel in my fingertips. I've never seen that before.

I want to get on a bus and ride across America. I'll take just a knapsack and a series of notebooks, one blue-veined sheet stacked onto another. I think I'd write poetry in New York and Tennessee. I could listen to Tori Amos and Miles Davis where I'm supposed to, you know, somewhere "up north." I could take in movies on a dusty summer afternoon, stop in little independent bookshops, and walk out onto the canyon cliffs. I can just imagine all the noise, and the lack of sound that would trickle down across America. It's funny that I like the word "America" but not "American." The latter is too political.

I could baptize myself again in the Colorado River.