535 miles from where ever you are

We’ve all met the guy. He’s the one that cringes whenever the radio station turns over from the AM to the FM. He’s the one that’ll tell you - “It’s all noise to me. Loud noise.”
I started driving yesterday with Stone Temple Pilots playing Lady Picture Show on my MP3 player. I don’t think that guy would even need to hear STP. You’d say the name and he’d know it was noise.
Anyways I crossed well over 500 miles today from Northern Illinois to Southwestern Missouri. Over the blacktop, with song after song keeping me company. I passed the green exit signs, blue rest area signs and the increasingly large number of Adult Video Billboards. I saw every Pizza Hut and Applebees, Chilis (ate at one) and McDonalds. There was a Wal-Mart there. Here was a Lowes. Across the street a Blockbuster and then a Best Buy.
By the end of the trip, I was on a track from Bob Marley. Music-lovers realize that generally Mr. Marley fits under the same rock or popular music category as STP. But other than that, and both groups association with recreational drug use, the comparasion ends there. The bands where separated in time by 20-plus years in terms of their popularity.
Marley burst onto the scene in the 70s as the voice of Reggae. STP was probably at best a second-tier grunge band and at worst a pretty good rock band. They’re both off different evolutionary branches of Rock’n’Roll that originated in the 1950s.
Yet that old man with the hearing aid and the flannel shirt would say the same thing. It’s all noise. Maybe slightly different noise. But noise all the same.
But I think I understand him now. Not about music but the landscape of this country. It’s all noise masked by bright lights and the smell of steak on the grill. Where once every city had it’s local restaurants and full service gas and each road it’s unique mystique, now there’s a cookie-cutter suburb.
I was on historic Route 66 today for a time, but I couldn’t tell what the big deal was. I may have been on Route 67 or 91 or 25. The truth is that this is a tree where all the branches are nearly exactly the same.
In less than 50 years, we’ve made 535 miles to the southwest pretty much the same as where we started.