Indeed, let’s. I remember coming back from 10 days off work to a new department. Mind you this was early summer, in Dallas. The air conditioning didn’t work. The toilet kept clogging up. The phone kept shorting out. We couldn’t connect to the server. My assistant manager was about to quit and try to take my top producer with him. Another producer quit and took one of the trainees with him. The company had paid a finder’s fee for the trainee; that had been about four months prior. He gave me three day’s notice. If I remember I told them both to bugger off.

I had a case of the shingles, and the neuralgia — that’s the pain-without-relief part — would last 160 days. Like the one about which Off Land’s Tim Dwyer writes, my commute was an hour each way. I would wake up at dark-fifteen to avoid traffic, but would often work until rush hour. Our salesman — and mind you this was our only salesman — had somehow nominated me his handler, and we argued three to four hours a day about nothing new, over and over and over and over.

We also had a new baby daughter, born April 5: 4/5/6. The date is impossible to forget, and believe me, this girl is impossible to forget. Our own little Athena, goddess of wisdom, as if she had leapt from the head of Zeus: tiny, but otherwise a woman. Our son was 17 months old, but stepped at once into the role of big brother. I remember collapsing onto the hallway floor sobbing with relief and exhaustion. Warts and all, I absolutely love to go back to 2006.

So take it away, Mr. Dwyer:

I used to hate my job, the dead-end brainless work.
Even more, I used to hate my commute.
An hour by subway what would take 20 minutes by car if I had owned one.
Everyday I walked to the subway, switching lines in town and took a 2nd line to the end.
I dreamed that one day the subway would take me past the last stop, just keep going.
Or maybe I would end up somewhere else, somewhere new.
Music was my salvation, my soundtrack, those two hours each day.
With or without music the commute was a score I listened to countless times.
On two occasions, for posterity, I recorded the commute.
Now it’s 2009 and my life has changed so much.
I look back into the dust of times and accompany a soundtrack to those days of travel.
This was my commute.

The EP is called Commute, and you can stream or download here. It’s ambient and experimental, but don’t let that scare you off. It’s the good kind of ambient and experimental.