Day 1-- Bradenton to Nashville

Memory Lane

It hadn’t been a minute since the Kia backed onto 52nd Avenue at 6 this morning, but I was already having flashbacks.

I passed the Checkers on Cortez Avenue, where my punk band Tripod would take brief practice breaks. “Brief” in this case meaning that they took two hours, a relatively short time to down four hamburgers without indigestion.

Then there was First Street, a scummy little strip I had to drive every day of summer ’04 to work as a dishwasher.

Suddenly, I was barreling down U.S. 41, not reeking of bait and failure this time, unlike my many trips to the Skyway Fishing Pier.

Then I-75 to Gainesville, a trip I’ve made so many times I can calculate when I’ll arrive in the home of the Swamp from any mile marker -- throwing in my usual stop at the Hardee’s in Sumterville, of course.

Except today, there was no Thickburger stop. I had bigger, but not especially healthier plans. Friends were awaiting me at the IHOP in Gainesville. Chicken fajita omlette: bad choice for a long drive. Adding hot sauce: even worse. I was feeling this breakfast all the way to Tennessee. Somewhere, there's a Georgian gas station attendant passed out in a bathroom from the fumes I left.

But back to the trip. I passed to Lake City, where flashbacks of Tallahassee trips engulfed my head. And then South Georgia, where Kristina Hager and I almost ran out of gas in a a sleep-be-damned excursion to the SEC Championship game in December.

And then to Atlanta, around I-285, where I was met with the same accident-filled traffic I had experience while visiting Russ Henry to see a Bucs-Falcons game.

In fact, until I got out of that gridlock, this felt like just another trip that I would return from in a few days.

Red Dawn
Now, it became real. With Atlanta behind me, I was in unfamiliar territory. Sure, I had grown up in Georgia, especially the red-clay covered north end, but I was 8 then.

The Smokey Mountains in the foreground, the interstate began to cut into hills and I was soon surrounded by high, imposing rock walls. Finally, there was no turning back, even mentally.

But then again, there were plenty of reasons to turn back. A batch of thick rain left the swerving I-24 slick and nearly undrivable for my overloaded compact car. I stopped at a rest area to avoid the downpour, only to learn that the station had flickering power -- and so did much of West Tennessee.

But the roads dried, and I made it to Nashville with few problems except for some dirty looks at my Florida Gators decal. I’ll miss SEC Country.

A few thoughts from a fatigued man:



New Vibrations
Since I didn’t have time to stop and explore my environment, I relied on the radio to give me local flavor. A preacher professed to me that when Jesus comes back, he will not be shunned like the last time. He then used amazingly complex circular logic to explain why affirmative action was the most moral thing the government could do.

On the west side of Atlanta, creeping along at about 5 mph, I uncovered what I can only describe as the basis for the radio in “Grand Theft Auto.” An uber-chill reggae song was followed by an acoustic song folksy enough to make me want some granola and hemp. It was deejayed by a Georgia Tech student who stuttered through a play list. He sent it over to a sports anchor who botched an interview with a Yellow Jackets volleyball player. His post-match analysis was a breathtaking re-reading of the stat sheet. God, I’m glad I went to UF for journalism.

In North Georgia, every radio station was flooded with talk of Michael Vick‘s guilty plea to dog fighting charges. Racial allegations were being carelessly tossed. Everyone was concerned -- for Vick, for dogs, for inner-city youth, for the Falcons. Everyone was to blame -- Vick, his dad, society, white people, black people, Eskimos.

Then, I crossed over into Tennessee, and everyone was happy about it. Funny what state lines can do.

Of course, most of the time, I was nowhere within the span of the AM/FM waves. Even then, the music from my CDs seemed to match the terrain. A psychedelic folk song squealed into one of those “everybody play at once!” solos the very second I was confronted with about 10 caution signs near Tifton. I read: “POSSIBLE WATER ON ROAD/ WORKERS PRESENT/ REDUCED SPEED LIMIT/ FOG-SMOKE WARNING/SPEEDING FINES DOUBLED/BUMP AHEAD/BRIDGE MAY ICE IN WINTER” in about 10 seconds while at least five different instruments played random notes at an eardrum-splintering volume level. Scorsese couldn’t have filmed this moment better.