Driving Through Mindscapes

The fields, barns, and farms, the dirt roads that seem to go nowhere, all these are familiar. The map of this part of Ohio is engraved like blood vessels crisscrossing his brain. He’s an interloper, but all the same knows these roads and has no need to find one way or another. All this journeys details fit like jigsaw fragments into a subliminal atlas. He drives a mindscape, one copied from a known reality, hands and eyes free to keep him from the unexpected, but there will be no unexpected. This is a world without traffic or people to move it along. The grazing cows and horses may be at the far end of their fields or near the road fence, but the mind accommodates these minor moving chess pieces. A pebbled parking lot, a Farmers Market. He has a magical shopping list that has written itself as the tires turned the miles over. Now he crosses between one elapsing mindscape to another, a place where he must linger as a stranger once more.