Tied to the whipping post

I spent the night at in New Orleans last night after a champagne-heavy, in-a-mansion engagement party for one of my best friends and after a breakfast of the best motherfucking croissants ever had by man or beast in or out of France, I hunkered down for the ride home. An houly bullet train between Baton Rouge and New Orlenas would make my life a lot easier, but until they do, I plan on keeping The Allman Brothers Band's At Fillmore East on my iPod.

I just finished Killing Yourself to Live, which has page after page of music to get you across the fruited planes of both love and country, and thereby am very susceptible to corny road music epiphanies right now, but really I was just wanting to get home, and was thinking that it would be nice if I could get home by the time "Whipping Post" finished, which started its 22 minute run right as this photo was snapped.

To my surprise, a wormhole heretofore unexperienced on this dreary stretch of I-10 opened up and, with their 11/8 time signature and incendiary synergistic gale in my sails, I shot down the highway as if in hyperspace. It confirmed my usual choice in riding alone, because no one should be victim to "Whipping Post" unwillingly and it needed to be heard right then to make the wormhole appear. It is the quintessential egregious jam, one whose pleasures come only with the beating you receive from it. As that fucking drum solo convinced me of its singular brilliance, I saw a sign showing Baton Rouge being only 19 miles off, and with my sense of time and proportion being bent like a needle dropped out of Gregg Allman's tour bus window, I thought it worked! I really will make it home before "Whipping Post" is over. I thought about those theoretical space travel routines, where a ship needs to slingshot around Jupiter to pick up enough speed to get to Saturn, and was momentarily convinced I had experienced that very thing in my decade old Corrolla.

I saw traffic quickly backed up to the dawn of time right after the exit. I also noticed a motorcycle nearly plummet into a truck, which seemed parked on the highway compared to the cyclist's speed, eerily mirroring the way Duane Allman went out, just as he picked up his guitar again in the song. But by then, the wormhole had already collapsed. I pulled off to the exit at the last second and took some lackluster back roads home, as eh transition to the even-longer but less epic "Mountain Jam" slid me eventually into my driveway.