Have you seen this man?

Greetings, internet enthusiast! I'd like to thank the Revere RMV for this glamour shot, taken a few weeks ago for my renewed license. I told A. afterward that if I ever go on a killing spree and they show this picture on the news, people will say "Well of course he's a murderer."

One thing about moving to the suburbs is you have to drive everywhere, so a valid operator's license is like prison cigarettes. In Cambridge I went quite awhile without a car and did just fine for the most part, since everything was within a ten-minute walk. It only got annoying when I had to meet people outside the reaches of the subway, such as the time I had to rely on a friend to pick me up at the blazing-hot South Acton commuter rail station when that friend is never on time for anything, so I stood there a good twenty minutes with my golf bag and a developing sunburn. Or when my bike and I rode the train out to Concord (bikes are just the clumsiest goddamn things when you're not riding them) and then biked for three miles to Minuteman Park so I could… go on a bike ride. And then ride back when I'm done riding. And then realize there's apparently a clan of hippies that does this every weekend, and they seem to be in cahoots with the train conductor, so the conductor hoards all the bikers into one car and doesn't make them buy tickets, which made half of my prepaid round-trip ticket an absolute waste. But even then, the Porter Square commuter rail station was ten minutes from my apartment. Not terrible.

In our new hometown the station is a five-minute walk from our front door, which is excellent since the train zips me back and forth to Boston in twenty-five minutes. Otherwise it's not particularly helpful (we'd rather drive to, say, Newburyport than commit to a schedule)—therefore, simple tasks like buying wart remover at CVS and bagging my own groceries at Stop & Shop require hopping in the car. Aside from walking to the beach, the library and this amazing Italian place we discovered, there's not much to walk to. But I guess those are pretty awesome things to have close by.

Which makes me one of those assholes who drives everywhere. I know it and I'm not proud… but it can't be helped. Feel free to walk that hour and a half to get me some damn eggs. Still, except for occasional trips the car sits in the garage ninety-five percent of the time. And one benefit of driving is I'm getting to know the area. I never had much connection to the North Shore. (And by "North Shore" I mean the part of Massachusetts north of Boston that's actually on or near the coast, and not landlocked towns that happen to be north or northwest of Boston, miles from the ocean. Semantics is semantics, but geography is geography—people need to stop pretending Andover and Melrose are seaside.) Occasional touristy trips to and family obligations in the area would bring me northeast every now and then, but that's about it. You don't even drive through these towns if you're going to New Hampshire or Maine because they're east of the interstates. But A. and I enjoyed these visits enough to put it on the eventual list of settle-down destinations. And here we are today.

Driving is the best way to learn what's what in these parts. And all the driving means a lot of radio-ing. Commercial radio stations are so weird, not only do they play the same newer songs over and over but they latch onto the same older songs. Sometimes you can attribute this to Rock Band or whatever, where people want suddenly to hear "Tom Sawyer" over and over. But other times I swear all the program directors are listening to each other. Since not one of them is capable of independent thought, they steal each other's "ideas" and turn the whole charade into some kind of circle-jerk for mimics. It can catch you off guard, like "Wow, you never hear 'Creeping Death' on the radio, cool!" But then you hear it on the next station too, and realize that a lot of people own and like Ride the Lightning, so it's not at all a bold programming decision. They'll probably follow it up with "Enter Sandman" anyway.

(The alternative, if I'm lucky to be driving on a weekday, is listening to WZBC or WMBR, though that always costs me money—a couple weeks ago I was compelled to buy "Erase You" by ESG and "In a Rut" by the Ruts after hearing them one recent morning.)

But on a trip to Target or something I might have to pop in a tape—I think I've mentioned before my excitement over our cassette deck. I get a kick out of this because I can revisit my salad days of music taste supremacy, when I openly judged people by the music they like. (Please infer that said judgment is merely silent today and not dormant. Aging and maturing are different things.) Lately I've dug up some old mixtapes, and it's high time to judge that elitist twenty-something asshole, show him who's boss. Or, perhaps, learn that he was a cool shit, and wonder whether continuing to like what I did a dozen years ago is good or bad. Have I progressed as a person? Have I erred in my own estimation as a wise and chiseled future-man? In a matter of days you will know. (Seriously, it's almost finished. And beyond excessive.)