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The road west last night didn’t unwind my thoughts as much as it usually does. Wisconsin’s drivers were as lead-footed and averse to signaling their lane-change intentions as ever, while Minnesota’s were pleasantly sparse, just the way I like them.

When I made that drive in the dark, once before, I wasn’t alone. But maybe the lack of introspection I attributed to my accompaniment was a function of the night drive, which I’ve felt variously capable of, suited for and protected from, justly or not, over the past several years.

Driving at night is driving with a purpose. Last night, my purpose was to recapture this experience. But I didn’t. And I’m glad.

The way my mind works is a lot like a harvester: gather in the stalks, chew them up in a very specific manner, spit out the chaff, hold on to the wheat. My grandpa was one with his hulking combine; my dad and uncles all did their time riding high in it.

We kids only got to approach it when it wasn’t running, so I can only draw on my experiences as a pretender to that lofty throne, bouncing on the dust-cured leather seat, maxing out my wingspan to grip both sides of the big wheel and squinting intently through the windshield like I was staring down the shimmering wheat field, calculating the turn for the next row.

But still the harvesting process is one that I recognize in how I go through life, gears and blades and sieves and levers and wheels smoothly coordinating to take things in and sort them out. And all that’s just a first pass, resulting in fairly raw material, high-quality though it may be.

My other grandfather was a cattle rancher, and that side of my heritage is where the extended metaphor becomes less flattering, because however explicable and entirely human my ruminative tendencies happen to be, the fact remains that they do not always serve me well. Or even often.

Holding on to certain of those grains I scythed and sieved and stored so efficiently reduces their utility and in fact makes a mockery of that main claim to fame of my German genes. What can efficiency throw in the face of stubborn fixation? I told you so’s are a waste of breath. But that’s just the edge of the wasteland as far as the effects of rumination on my life are concerned.

So – I think about things selectively, some more than others, and for many years this has been my path to high hopes turning to dashed ones, inconsistencies that consistently add up to awful truths, excitement that fizzles unspectacularly after too much pressure is applied to the system all at once, like a shaken-up 2-liter of soda.

None of that made me stop getting lit up about things. It did shift my expectations to a low level, of being prepared to be satisfied with a reasonable facsimile of a previous enjoyable experience. Chasing sameness while telling myself I might want better, might think there’s still something new under the sun or moon for me, but it’s not to be.

And if I set myself up for last night by letting my expectations plummet, I hope I can keep them there. I was excited about it, but only because it had surprised me last time, and I was hoping to relive that, fleeing in denial from my firm knowledge that surprise is an element so volatile they didn’t even bother putting it on the periodic table.  But lo and behold, it wasn’t anything like it was before, seeing the Pines this time.

And it probably won’t ever be either of those ways again, but it will still be those two voices, the one that’s like my mom’s sour-cream chicken, velvety-irresistible and fork-tender, and the buzzing live-wire one that I wouldn’t get anywhere near with a metallic object.

Variably inclusive of guitars, piano, drums, banjo, sax, Mason and that amorphous atmosphere that should probably go higher on the list. Feedback not included. Everything I seek in music, all over again and more so than ever.