Get along, Get Acquainted

You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you might find
You get what you need...

I'm cheerful most of the times, but I do like the occasional brooding. It's easy being the laughing, blithering idiot rather than a man with questions and no answers. I'd been in a bad mood over the last few days. The weather, which I rarely get to notice owing to my 9-5, was cold and gloomy too. Finally the clouds lifted, and I took the "shiny red" out for a spin. I set off "east" with no particular destination in mind.

You got a fast car
I want a ticket to anywhere
Maybe we make a deal
Maybe together we can get somewhere

I set the cruise 5 below the speed limit and let the curves of the road unfold in front of me. I turned left at a random intersection and was in the "countryside". I had a Jeep in front of me and a Mustang behind. I was in America.

A lot of Indians would fault me for loving my stay here so much. I'm like my fellow MS-graduates-coding-and-trying-to-fit-in who seem to be almost everywhere. Apart from all the financial sense moving here made, I now realize that I truly felt I'd be able to make this my home.

"There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning . . . And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave"

I grew up in the 90s reading about America in the 70s. America was not a place - it was a lifestyle. It was about muscle cars and Jack Daniels. It was about Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin. It was about a narrow road flanked by fields on either side. Where god fearing farmers wearing baseball caps drove big trucks with bales of hay in the back. It was about grain silos and barns in the middle of nowhere.

I ended up in a mess of poltically correct, wannabe Eastern hippies (hello Boulder, CO) but thankfully, it takes 20 mins of driving to find the America I've always imagined. I passed a few intersections, saw tame horses blinking in the fading daylight. I drove on and reached a huge lake in middle of nowhere. The wind felt good, lake was spotless - all I had to do was ignore the porta-potty.

On the way back, saw the blue family version of my shiny red. We were driving in the opposite directions and were both wearing shades. Our gazes met and there was a slow smile of familarity.

I like fitting in.