The shop’s about twenty two minutes outside town, up a stretch of road that climbs and then drops through a run of switchbacks that I could probably drive with my eyes closed at this point, three years in. I bring this up because it’s the one part of my day that has absolutely nothing to do with games or books or any of the stuff I usually write about here, and I’ve come to genuinely need it in a way I didn’t expect when I first took the job.
Mornings it’s quiet, radio off most days, just the sound of the road and whatever’s on my mind from the night before. Evenings are the ones I actually look forward to, especially in fall when the light comes in low and orange through the trees along the ridge, and there’s a specific turn about two thirds of the way down where the valley opens up all at once and you can see clear across to the next range if the haze isn’t too thick that day. I’ve almost missed my exit more than once because I was looking at it instead of the road, which I recognize is not a great habit to admit to in writing.
It’s twenty two minutes and I don’t listen to podcasts, don’t call anyone, don’t think about a rulebook I need to read or a review I owe somebody. I used to feel a little guilty about that, like unstructured time was time wasted, the same instinct that makes me keep a paper log of every book I finish, wanting some record, some output, from every hour of the day. The drive broke me of that a little. Nothing comes out of those twenty two minutes except the twenty two minutes themselves, and somewhere in the last year I stopped needing it to produce anything.
Dev asked me once what I actually think about on that drive and I genuinely didn’t have an answer for him, not because I was hiding something, but because I don’t think I’m thinking about anything in particular most days, which might be the actual point. I check tolerances all day at the shop and I plan game nights down to the seating chart some Fridays, and this is the one twenty two minute stretch where nothing has to fit anything else. I’d guess most people have some version of this, a commute, a walk, a shower, whatever their particular gap is. Mine happens to have a really good view around the second-to-last switchback, and I’ve stopped apologizing to myself for not using it better.