Originally published in The Clifton Courier, May 27, 2020

Ok, so driving with me is a bit of an experience.

But, then, driving with anyone is a bit of an experience. Because, if you pay attention, the way someone acts behind the wheel can be quite revealing about what is going on in the thinnkbox atop someone’s neck.

The most obvious is the selection of music. You can learn a lot about a person based on their playlists. With me, you have the depressing indie songs that allude to my pretentiousness. There’s the Fleetwood Mac, which suggests I’ve reached a certain level of maturity in my late 20s where I crave easy listening music. The selection of a few specific Top 40 songs that say I’m aware enough about current trends to be relevant, but not so obsessed with them that I’m mainstream. And then you have the sprinkling of Lee Kernaghan to communicate my regional town roots but complete lack of agricultural knowledge – in case the clean Akubra and liberal use of the word “mate” didn’t already drop that hint.

You also get a glimpse of the rage that bubbles underneath my serene (it’s serene, right… right?!) exterior by my angry commentary of the drivers behaving like absolute roo heads in front of me. I mean, I’m not someone who hangs out of the car screaming obscenities at people and shake my fists or anything.  I don’t want the other drivers to know I’m taking about them, so I am usually quite restrained in my body language. My style of road rage is more like a stream of consciousness kind of a thing – I’m more of a mutterer, kind of like I’m hexing someone under my breath.

But perhaps the best insight into the way I think is when people are giving me directions.

When I’m driving by myself, I usually stick to the same routes I’ve travelled before as I click into a focused but somehow also absentminded autopilot mode. I tap into a way of thinking that feels more instinctual than analytical. More humanities than science. More art than maths, ya know?

Like, I go by feel, not by following steps.

Kind of like how learning a dance by breaking it down into tiny steps feels impossible and silly, but breaking out an interpretive number on the dance floor is completely natural.

That’s like how I drive.

I mean, people can say “turn right” but what does that actually mean, you know?

This is the part where I level with you.

I’ve always had trouble with my lefts and rights. It’s just never been my thing. Like, you know that thing where you make an L shape with your index finger and thumb on both hands and the one that looks like an L is your left hand? Well, for the longest time, I just thought the angle of the left hand fingers was closer to the 90-degree corner angle than your right hand, therefore making it a better L shape. It just didn’t occur to me that one of the Ls was back to front.

Maybe it’s dumb, but maybe it’s an example of my brain just not confirming to the boxes of society, man. Like, maybe it’s not that I don’t know my left from right, but that I transcend lefts and rights.

And maybe me needing to go for my Learners’ test four times because I kept mixing up my lefts and rights was a journey I needed to go on because I still had unfinished business on the school bus that I couldn’t have completed if I was behind the wheel of a car, you know?

So, with all this in mind, I’ll describe a recent scene when I was driving with a first-time passenger who directed me to turn right and was flummoxed when I changed lanes to turn left.

I had to explain that, sometimes, it just doesn’t occur to me that left is left or that right is right. That it’s more of the vibe of the thing and that, sometimes, the left direction just has more of a righthand vibe, you know?

It’s been a little while now and that first-time passenger hasn’t become a second time passenger yet.

I’m not really sure why.