When I wake I look out my window and it’s completely dark with no-one, nothing, nowhere, no colour, whilst our headlights reach like giant arms into black hole USA and the stereo plays a lonely Gomez number. We stop and I get out to have a piss and the ground under my feet is as cold as the Nevada air and I hurry to get back in and hope that it all comes quick.

Dick takes the wheel and straight away we get rising mountains and sleet snow and this is all gonna come on tired and hard with eyes narrowed and feet edgy. Sometime way later we’ll cross into Utah and then Colorado and all the while pushing, pushing. But sometimes, like now, it’s hard to see the goal and the point in everything when it’s all so dark. What does Boulder matter to all this thick black desert snowy night? What does Pat’s job, my job, Dick’s job, your job really matter now, in a place like this? There’s maybe a zillion of these kinda roads the world over. Maybe you’re heading down your own right now. And maybe you’re like us, far from home, if you even have an idea of what that might be, disappearing into the desert with no other cars or life or anything else out there – nothing but the black cold of night and its falling sleet. And if you’ve ever traveled a road like this, maybe you’ve done it with people like Dick and Pat – guys who’d never back off an inch, either way, for you and wherever it is you’re headed.

All of this plays over in my head with ‘Free to Run’ on the stereo and I think back over it – everything before I came and everything after. And I close my eyes and it comes at me like a lit-up firework of images and sounds and laughter and pain, but in the end all of it explodes into the most beautiful chrysanthemum firework I’ve ever seen – my whole world exploding at me, shooting through the falling white of blackness Nevada and I feel myself begin to break up with all that falling snow – all those rushing-down tiny flakes, none of which are similar to any other, and I feel my body, my mind, my everything break up and scatter and I’m happy to see it all go and it’s so much clearer now, with each part of me floating off into the snow and the night, each piece blowing up in its own firework across the sky. And I see it all so simple and bright and all my bits keep exploding and lighting up the dark until my whole world turns white with its passing through time eternal, through me, though you, through everything always.Boom