Everyone knows that not all silences are created equal. Different silences have different qualities and provoke wildly different emotional responses. One of my favorite silences is the one that occurs after a long day's road trip, when in the middle of the night you and your friend pull into a motel parking lot, right in front of the brightly-illuminated office, and he gets out to register. He leaves the radio on for you but you turn it off. All day the radio's been playing, you've been on the freeway, there's been conversation and/or music and the sound of the interstate, and now, suddenly, there's this amazing silence and stillness. You can see him standing there leaning on the counter, looking as bedraggled as you feel, and the inside of the car is so quiet it's almost startling. You are suddenly aware of your own breathing and your heartbeat. I have always loved this moment. Sometimes the car makes that little metronome sound, those clicks, and that's acceptable somehow.

If you crane your neck you can look up at the tall motel sign looming overhead. Should you keep the window rolled up to enjoy the density of this silence? Or should you open the window to maybe hear the faint crackle of the sign's neon, or the buzz of the office fluorescents, or even better, the crunch of the gravel under the car's tires as you pull into the parking lot in front of your room? Later you can maybe hear the sounds of the freeway as you fall asleep, and that's a good one too. If there isn't a Joni Mitchell song about that one, there should be.

One of the great things about a road trip is that even though you might have a destination and matters to attend to wherever it is, during the trip itself you exist in a kind of abstraction of time and place and enjoy a temporary suspension of some of the more tedious aspects of personal identity. A road trip is where almost nothing happens and where you are let off the hook almost completely regarding such burdensome matters as who you are, past events, and future potentialities. All you need to do on a road trip is drive, that's the extent of your obligation. Because of this escape from selfhood it offers, a road trip is the only place I can be alone with my thoughts for more than five minutes without succumbing to anxiety or negative feelings.