Driving Occupied.

There's been an important development to my life since I updated this blog regularly that I haven't really talked about yet.

I actually drive, now.

Yeah, I have a car and everything.  I'd been an avowed pedestrian for a very long time.  You can get away with that, living in a college town in the Midwest.  Living in southern California...good luck.  Places where you can afford to live aren't always close to places that can employ you.  The bus and train systems seem fine, but just not dense enough to really work for me.

Now, I get sleepy as hell when I'm in a car for any length of time.  Actually, mornings seem fine - it's that afternoon/evening drive, after the workday, that drains my consciousness.  Music, for the most part, doesn't help, and that seems really odd.  It doesn't matter how much nostalgia I feel for a song, or how funny or catchy or how much it incites the feels, music can't seem to compete with the hypnosis of the slow crawl home.

I found a solution to both this problem and the fact that I don't read books as much as I used to.  Audiobooks and serial podcasts.

I seem to subscribe to a lot more things, these days, and one of those things is Audible.com.  This was my initial solution, and I could not stop gushing about how good it was.  I checked out a couple of Stephen King novels I hadn't read before - Mr. Mercedes, then Doctor Sleep (after The Shining, because before I had only seen the movie).  I finally finished The Baroque Cycle novels by Neal Stephenson, and just recently revisited an old favorite, Good Omens by Terry Pratchet and Neil Gaiman.  And since each of these books are fairly lengthy, they managed to keep me awake for weeks of commuting.

It's weird to me that I can be perfectly aware of what I'm doing while driving at the same time as I'm giving a ton of attention to someone with an interesting voice read a good book to me.  How does this actually work?  I feel like I should have gotten into several small accidents or I should be missing huge gaps in the stories, but for some reason, brains seem to keep everything tidy.

From the intro for the first episode.  Hooked right there.

Meanwhile, my sisters had been hyping some podcasts for a while, and some of my nerdier friends had been hyping other podcasts.  I'm not (yet) into news or talk show podcasts - maybe I haven't found personalities that really interest me, but stories - stories hook me.  So I started checking some of those out.

My first, and favorite, has to be Welcome to Night Vale.  It's the ongoing story of a strange little city in the American Southwest, told by a local radio personality via his radio show.  Most episodes are, well, episodic, but that only helps highlight all the characters, all the stories going on there, and there is enough continuity to help me wonder what happens next.  It's not easy to sit on the edge of the driver's seat.

Other favorites I've found include Serial (thanks to my sister for that one), a much more serious, sobering, and less fictional story, and The Thrilling Adventure Hour, which is less serious, sobering, and...nah, probably equally fictional.  The Thrilling Adventure Hour is actually a number of more-and-less episodic stories, from space westerns to WWII-era adventures, all done in the style of, as they say, "old-time radio."

So, that's how I use my travel time wisely.  I ask you, theoretical reader - what totally legals means do you use to stay awake for your commute?  Do you have a favorite audiobook or podcast?  Do you just read normal novels while in traffic instead?


Disclaimer 1:  This post is not sponsored by Audible.  I just use it, because it is a thing I know exists.

Disclaimer 2:  Look for Welcome to Night Vale art on the internet, but be warned - none of it will leave you with less questions than you had before you searched.