Down the Rabbit Hole

Dashboard Confessional

I heard a song by the band Dashboard Confessional the other day and decided I liked both the song and the band's name a lot. The song, called "Vindicated", made me think about the past and of many of my own dashboard confessionals. It seemed, during the darker times in my life, nothing calmed me more than a long and rambling road trip, accompanied by good tunes with lyrics compossed by the bleeding fingertips of my kindred spirits. I remember one trip in particular, when driven to the brink of my sanity by both a painful divorce and equally painful affair, I rented a red convertible mustang and promptly took off towards the Cape. I took the long way out to Cape Cod, and with the sun beating down and the cowboy junkies woeful wailing getting lost in the sky above me, I made peace with my spirit. On the way I made a stop in Woods Hole. I had a coffee by the same pier where I had once departed in a 180 foot schooner to find the edge of the gulfstream current. I recalled the afternoon we found it, the place where the warmer current met our coastal seas. I watched my fellow crew members jump from the stern into the blue and spent a hour pulling the heavy floating rafts of sargassium seaweed onto the deck to document the creatures they habored. It felt good to be in that place, to reconnect with that girl who believed everything she ever wanted could be found in a boat, a lab and under the waves.