Caution Curves

There must be a word for that sudden, inexplicable urge to drive your car into a telephone pole. You know the urge I mean. (I hope it's not just me...): you're driving on a perfectly safe stretch of road, having a completely unremarkable, maybe even happy day—till a little devil on your shoulder tells you to flick the wheel hard to the left, into oncoming traffic, a telephone pole or off a cliff.

You don't do it, of course. There's a half-second pause between the thought popping into your head, and your acting on that impulse—and that's enough time for you to realize it'd be a really stupid idea. It's enough time to stop yourself.

Usually.

Hopefully.

Even if you do manage to stop yourself (and if you're reading this, I assume that you've always managed to stop yourself), still there's a subsequent adrenaline rush, when you realize how thin the line is between an idea and an action; between thinking of driving off the cliff, and driving off the cliff; between a blissful, unremarkable day on a country road, and a life-altering collision of your own making.

* * *

Mothers, lock up your daughters, and drivers, lock up your cars: the devil on my shoulder is loud and insistent, and lately, in many aspects of my life, I'm pulling the wheel hard to the left. I'm making irrevocable and maybe irrational decisions.

Why? I'm not sure I could say. The road was too straight, too smooth. It was too easy to see where it was going. It wasn't going anywhere.

Or, ...

The devil made me do it.

* * *

There's another, similar siren call I've always found hard to resist—the call of mountain roads. Too many nights I've hurtled a car recklessly up and down the hairpins of Mulholland Drive, defying gravity to pull me off. I'd drive so hard it'd make me sweat, knowing anything—a bump in the road, gravel, a deer, (a pedestrian) could be the difference between living and dying.

What I've never been able to explain: it's not a death wish that drives me to be so reckless. It is absolutely not a wish to die.

It's a wish to live. A wish to be alive and to feel it.

There must be a word for that.