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1/ Hi I'm going suggest you listen to two things. Two perfect things. I debated which order you should listen to them, but here goes.
2/ The first, you likely know. Simon & Garfunkle's America. You've heard it a million times. It's perfect. Compact, evocative, with a punch to the gut like the end of The Graduate. Here's a very famous exquisite live performance at CP. Those harmonies!
3/ Here are the lyrics. So much happening in so few words! 
4/ The second is a 2016 episode of Nate Demo's @thememorypalace, which if you don't listen to, immediately rectify. It is on road trips, also. And how African American's used the Green Book to navigate safe and hostile spaces. Get to the end. thememorypalace.us/2016/05/open-r…
5/ It's going to take like 7 minutes for anyone to pretend they've listened to both these things, I'll wait.
6/ I love the way that Nate made something most non black people were probably not or barely aware of come to life, joyous but perilous. And to me the last line is both a rebuke and embrace of the characters in the Simon & Garfunkle song...
7/ Like you think you have it so hard you post-college kids, your fears and angst about Vietnam and your parents consumer bullshit, how about just trying to make it a gas station where you don't get killed.
8/ And as a white listener you're taken to something you don't know that much about, and made to feel it, and then snapped back to something you grew up with, and the emotions of each collide in disorienting and yet familiar way.
9/ and the moon rose over an open field. Who hasn't—even if they've never left a city or been in a car—known that precise aperture to the soul?
10/ My smug ending is that neither of these things took a tiny fraction of 10,000 words to be great.
A more honest confession would be that Michigan seems like a dream to me now.
A more honest confession would be that Michigan seems like a dream to me now.
