Some days are like that.

When feeling that way I have this habit of buying $75-$100 worth of groceries like it's the most normal thing in the world. Today it involved 5 trips to 4 grocery and convenience stores in 3 boroughs. Maybe I am subconsciously preparing for Y2K; that might explain today's purchases of 14 cans of soup, 4 frozen pizza-for-ones, and more chicken legs than I have fingers with which to count.

A lot of good canned goods and the like will do me when the power grids go down and the apocalypse formally begins once and for all.

Now it is late in the afternoon and the adrenaline is slowing. I am planning an Elton John marathon at my apartment tonight. Volume 1 of "To Be Continued..." is already playing, and eventually I think I'll go back to "Honky Chateau" and "Caribou" before cracking open the Elvis "Aloha" and 1968 videos.

This is an occasional Saturday-night ritual of mine. I can trace its origins with precision to the summer of 1985, when a friend and I were at a Woolworth in Tampa and we discovered a basket of remaindered 8-track tapes on sale for 28¢ a piece.

My car (a 1968 Dodge Dart) had an 8-track player in it, and we excitedly bought up every 8-track title we might possibly ever want to listen to while riding around in my car. Then we drove around and around and around town talking and laughing and listening to Elton John, the Steve Miller Band, Alicia de la Rocha playing Granados' "Goyescas," and I don't remember what else we bought that day. But it all got played over and over for hours and hours.

I listened to the Elton John tapes literally hundreds of times, and can not hear "Burn Down the Mission" or "Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters" without remembering how free I felt driving that car through the Tampa suburbs.

Right now, I remember the late-night drive home from my girlfriend's house in Brandon, and how Elton John's colorless but sincere music always cast the perfect mood for interstate driving. I liked to imagine growing up to be a truck-driver like those I drove home with those nights. I could spend my life silently sharing this loneliness with the others. As a teen-ager I imagined the United States to be a country full of drivers on the road united in this pursuit for that period of time in which they came together in this indiscriminate way.

I find that driving with others is usually an urgent, almost desperate situation. If the driver won't run the goddam red light that has not changed for 12 minutes then s/he will make you eat drive-thru Burger King feed in the 112-degree heat of the parking lot when there are dozens of perfectly suitable tables inside the air-conditioned restaurant.

Last night a friend of mine drove me around the city. He was a little tipsy but OK to drive, and he reminded me how much fun it used to be to make fun of road signs and traffic warnings.

As I try to remind friends and colleagues, it is the simple pleasures that help me pass the days.

He saw a sign that said "ROAD SERVICE BY PERMIT ONLY," and said "Look at that. If you just want to get out your jackhammer and start servicing this road, you better have your permit ready!" And I sat in the back seat laughing and laughing in the way my sister and I used to see billboards and read them as fast as we possibly could, reading every word out loud before the car passed the signs completely.

Most of the signs were simple fare: "HEY, YOU MISSED STUCKEY'S! NO PROBLEM, THE NEXT STUCKEY'S IS ONLY 111 MILES!" We would giggle at having read the whole sign in one breath.

But other signs were more cluttered. Too cluttered for me to remember today. Real estate signs, amusement park signs, local television and radio billboards that just had too many words for the not-so-casual observer.

I remember driving from Florida to Oberlin, Ohio, through West Virginia on the West Virginia Turnpike. I had cruise control set at 86 miles per hour, and people were passing me. In later years I realized that my sister (sitting in the back seat) was terrified. I only know that because of the offhand comment she made later that night that we got where we were going real fast due to my "daredevil driving." It was her tone of voice that tipped me off. 7 or 8 years later.

I remember crossing 105 miles per hour that day. I was 19 or 20.

The only other time I can clearly remember driving that fast was one night in Tampa, April of 1986, coming home from ... I don't remember what we were coming home from. But a co-editor from the school newspaper and I were routinely driving north on I-75 when we noticed each other. I turned and saw him, and he saw me and shot me a faux-redneck grin that I never forgot, and the next thing I knew we were zooming through some fairly dense traffic in a race. A race to where, I don't know. Americans just race even when they have no where to go.

There were only 2 lanes of traffic, but I used the emergency lanes on both sides to pass people, and before long every car I raced up to got the hell out my way immediately. It fucking kicked ass. I can still see those turn signals blinking as all cars before me cleared a path. I was the King of Interstate 75 that night.

But I had not out-raced my friend. At 110 miles per hour I looked through the passenger seat window and there he was in the other lane, grinning a wild, spit-covered, toothy smile and beating his steering wheel without so much as looking at the road in front of us. "Foiled!" I shouted at him, fist-a-flying. He exited the interstate at Busch Boulevard, and we went home to our mothers. All the while Elton John 8-tracks played in my car like nothing else was happening.

He and I never talked about that race, though we saw each other several times. Last I heard he was a ballet dancer in San Jose, California. I heard he would be at the 10-year high school reunion I went to in 1996, but never saw him there. He was someone I respected but never envied. He did everything well, and he knew it, but he didn't beat me that night. If we had had a target, or a goal, then maybe a winner could have been determined. But at 18 years old we were just racing.