Wednesday morning & nodding in red Sentra - Route 63 and environs smearing left & right, and straight ahead, conical headlamp beams reach and weakly illuminate the January mist. Bassist Herr M, with gloved hand, struggles with radio buttons while emiting visible nimbus clouds of breath & curses that bank and dissolve in the chilly car cabin interior. Meanwhile, Passenger is formulating millisecond dreams - of East Beach, sun-browned skin & turquoise surf, of deepest green pools & salty smiles - of rising tides & words & images & all the rest.

Mt. Toby is ink black cut-out silhouette against grey & murky night sky. The automatic station scan halts on Skynard's Sweet Home Alabama - "Oh, now here's a deep cut!", inveighs Herr M, his voice frosted over with sarcasm. Gore-tex fingers trample the buttons, then, something familiar - it takes a moment to place the sound - then it's obvious - MUA is playing the raucous recording made in 1998 - in the dank cellar with 5-foot ceilings, various molds & lots of broken glass. What the... Is this real? That's the melodically challenged Herr M playing guitar(?), and just 2 bars into the solo his fingers are hopelessly caught in the strings, and for the remainder of his time in the spotlight he attempts to extricate his tangled digits, the resultant noises being all at once tortured, turgid & absolutely wailing, providing a learned dissertation on concepts of devolution through punk-rock guitar. 90 seconds later, the sonic avalanche ends abruptly with a bone-crushing crash & the drunken musicians' un-stifled laughter. Inside the warming Sentra, we are rolling as though perpetrators of some absurd hoax - as Orson Wells must have laughed on Halloween 1938.

The moment passes as quickly as it came and Passenger re-enters blurry roadside mailbox dreamworld - sipping gold from small glass with salty sea breeze on face, eyes on distant roiling whitecaps & mind on local idle foolishness.