Last night, I told myself I would listen to Queensryche’s “Silent Lucidity” on the way to work the next morning. Why Silent Lucidity? I don’t know. The song popped into my head last night and I remembered how good it was.

I hadn’t heard the song in a long time. I remembered when it came out in 1991 and was overplayed so much on the radio that I got sick of it. But 20 years had erased the damage and I was ready to once again listen to it with fresh ears.

It was a lullaby of sorts, a power ballad, atmospheric, and I remember some people saying Queensryche had ripped off Pink Floyd.

I figured the song would drown out the radio talk show chatter on guns, White House chaos, Syria, Russian meddling, etc. Another day of all of us on this floating blue and green orb trying to kill each other. Somehow I don’t think that’s how things were meant to be, but then again I think someone may have purposely put the capacity for evil in all of us, why I don’t know. Maybe it’s a yin-and-yang thing, balance of the universe. It makes sense to me that we might have to sink to the lowest depths of depravity in order to see the value in good. Enough of that. Still, I managed one thought relating to our world leaders. What do these guys do after they get out of bed and eat their breakfast? Trump, Putin, Kim Jong-un? We the little people go off to do our menial tasks that make the world go ’round while these guys start another day deciding if the world will continue to exist. What does that feel like?

So here it is, another chance
Wide awake you face the day
Your dream is over
Or has it just begun?

As I was making my 33-mile trek, I marveled at how smooth the surface of Interstate 71 was. I remember the horror when they had started resurfacing it. All of us commuters got grumpy and rolled our eyes. Because of the lip between the old surface and the surface being worked on, when you hit it, it felt as if your car was crunching down into a deep chasm. Then you had to endure miles of ungodly rumbling so loud you couldn’t hear your radio as your tires shimmy-shook through the grooves of the subsurface. And then there were the rocks, little bits of asphalt sprayed from other vehicles, assaulting you from all sides. And finally, the teeth-rattling THWUMP! as you hit another lip, exited the hole and got back onto the old surface.

As I sailed along the new silky smooth surface at a 70-mile-per-hour clip, I thought, man, all that pain was actually worth it. Look what we got out of it! And I thought, you know what? There are some life lessons in resurfacing roads: You have to go through hell to get to heaven. When life gives you potholes, you CAN patch them up, but it’s going to take hard work and determination. And it may nearly kill you. But if you decide nothing can be done about them, you’ll spend the rest of your life dodging them, eventually suffering a blowout.

It’s a place where you will learn
To face your fears, retrace the years
And ride the whims of your mind
Commanding in another world
Suddenly, you hear and see
This magic new dimension

Yeah, something like that.