The random-date archive wheel dropped me on Sunday, December 17, 2000, which at first looked like a blank day because I didn’t actually publish anything that Sunday. Then I looked one day forward and found twenty-year-old me still talking about the night before, and suddenly the date opened up.

The post begins with a line from Sunny Day Real Estate’s Jeremy Enigk — “december’s tragic drive, when time is poetry” — followed by me saying that I understood it now, and that is probably the best place to start because the real story here isn’t just where I went that weekend. It’s the drive home, alone, after all of it. I have always done some of my best thinking behind the wheel. There is something about having nowhere to be except the next mile, enough of my brain occupied by the road that the rest of it can wander wherever it wants, music filling the space where another person might otherwise be talking. On the morning of December 17, 2000, I was twenty years old, driving Becca’s old Nissan Sentra south on I-5 sometime after midnight, and I had a lot to let wander around in my head.

The day had started in Portland and carried me all the way north for Natalie’s wedding, somewhere north of Seattle. I described it the next morning as a nice, small wedding, exactly the kind I thought I wanted someday, except I was already convinced I would somehow end up with too many people at mine. Natalie getting married was not just some random acquaintance checking the marriage box. She belonged to an earlier chapter of my life, and there is something strange about being twenty and watching people who have occupied your own recent past begin making choices that look permanent. Weddings do that even when you are older, but at twenty they can feel like little previews of adulthood being handed out around the room while you’re still waiting to find out what kind of person you are going to become. At the wedding I ran into Liam and Karen Macomb, who I knew from Ecola. They had gotten married about a year earlier, and after the wedding I followed them back to their place, met their dog, and sat around talking for a while. That tiny detail means more to me now than it did when I typed it. Natalie was getting married. Liam and Karen were already married, living together, with a dog, inhabiting this small domestic life that twenty-year-old me could visit for an hour and then leave. I don’t remember what we talked about. I don’t need to manufacture some profound conversation that probably didn’t happen. The thing I can imagine clearly enough is simply being there, looking at another possible version of adulthood and then getting back into my car.

From there I drove into Seattle’s University District for a show at The Paradox, though the version of me writing the next morning didn’t bother naming the venue. That detail had to wait twenty-six years for me to recognize it. Padre played first, and I thought the singer sounded so much like the guy from Roadside Monument that I wrote about it, especially after they closed with a Roadside song. There was another band I wasn’t really in the mood for that I described as sounding like they should have been doing the soundtrack to The NeverEnding Story, which is such an aggressively twenty-year-old Adam description that I’m glad it survived. Blenderhead played last and, according to me, knew how to rock. I bought their six-song EP for a dollar. Then sometime around midnight I left, stopped at Jack in the Box, and hit the road south at exactly 12:25 in the morning. I was driving Becca’s old Nissan Sentra—the car we had crashed in, which her dad sold to me for one dollar. I had painted a giant target on one of the doors. The passenger door was busted and strapped shut, so the only way in was through the driver’s side. I also know that Portland-to-Seattle run was not some exotic road trip for me. I did it a lot. I knew that stretch of I-5 well enough that I joke now that I could probably have done it in my sleep if there hadn’t been other cars involved, which is especially unfortunate wording given that young Adam also wrote that the music and the wind were helping keep him awake. I wrote that I drove eighty for quite a bit of the way, which sounds dramatic until you remember the speed limit was seventy and traffic was generally doing eighty anyway. I wasn’t trying to set a land-speed record. I was just flowing south with everybody else, in a car and on a road that felt familiar.

What I don’t have, frustratingly and wonderfully, is a transcript of what I thought about for those two hours and thirty-five minutes. I wish twenty-year-old me had written that part down. He gave me the itinerary, the bands, the food stop, the exact departure time, the speed, the fact that the wind was coming in, and then he just skipped right over the inner monologue as if that were the least interesting part. But I know how my brain works in a car, and I know there was plenty sitting beside me even if nobody else was in the passenger seat. I had just watched Natalie get married. I had just sat in Liam and Karen’s home and met their dog, seeing friends from Ecola already inhabiting a life that looked established in ways mine did not. I had gone straight from all of that domestic adulthood into a rock show, which was another place I knew how to be, bought a cheap EP, and then pointed myself toward home with music blasting. There is a kind of emotional whiplash in that sequence that feels completely natural to me: wedding, married friends, dog, punk and indie bands, Jack in the Box, interstate. None of those things cancel the others out. They were all parts of the same life I was trying to assemble. And somewhere between Seattle and Portland, with December air coming through the windows of that battered Sentra and the stereo keeping me company, I had miles and miles to ask myself where exactly I fit among them.

That question turns out to be sitting all over the other things I was writing in December 2000. Twenty-year-old me was restless. I was questioning my faith, looking for a church and a kind of Christian community that felt real rather than performative, wanting relationships and connection without really knowing what I wanted them to look like, thinking about work and whether school made sense, going to shows constantly, listening to music as if it might explain me back to myself, and watching other people begin to settle into answers. I don’t want to retroactively turn that overnight drive into a movie scene where every one of those themes arrived in perfect order somewhere around Olympia. Memory doesn’t work that way, and mine certainly doesn’t. Maybe I spent twenty minutes thinking about the wedding and an hour singing loudly. Maybe I thought about Liam and Karen for five minutes, then work, then a girl, then what I wanted for breakfast, then whether I had enough gas. That actually sounds more like me. But that messiness is the point. Driving has always given me a container for exactly that kind of thinking, where the enormous questions and the stupid little ones are allowed to ride together until something starts making sense. The road moves in one direction even when my thoughts don’t, and I think that has always helped me.

Young Adam said he made it home in two hours and thirty-five minutes, hit the bed, and slept until noon. Then he got up and wrote about the trip and, before telling any of it, reached for that Jeremy Enigk line about December, driving, and time becoming poetry. That may be the part of the archive I trust most. I can’t recover exactly what I was pondering at 1:30 in the morning on I-5. I can recover the fact that I recognized the drive as something worth marking while it was still fresh. Twenty-six years later, I understand that instinct even better. Some places in my life have been rooms, some have been churches, some have been stages or coffee shops or apartments, and some have been cars moving through the dark. That battered, one-dollar Sentra was one of those places. The road between Seattle and Portland was one of those places. I rocked out, I replayed the weekend, I watched the exits go by, and somewhere in all of that I was trying to understand what adulthood was supposed to look like and whether I was getting any closer to it. Twenty-year-old me had a lot to ponder. Forty-five-year-old me is just grateful he left enough breadcrumbs that I can get back in the car with him for a little while.