On my 22nd birthday in the summer of 2011, I was riding in a van on the way to Oregon with my bandmates. It was about five in the morning, and although Amanda and Adrienne were both snoozing, and sleep was tugging heavily on me, I was still awake. Tyler sat at the wheel, barreling down an unlit highway somewhere in the Middle of Nowhere, Nevada. He was headed to Oregon as fast as he could, even if it meant driving through the night.
I squinted at the dotted yellow line stretching out before us into the darkness, vision hazy with sleep. It took me several minutes of staring to realize that the lines were in the center of my field of vision, disappearing under the middle of the van. Tyler was driving in the center of the highway.
“Sir, what are you doing?” I asked.
As if it was the most obvious thing in the world, he answered, “I’m being Pacman.”
“Tyler,” I said, “please pull over.”
He did. He got half an hour of sleep, and then took off on the road again, this time driving in the correct lane. Nothing could keep him from returning to his homeland of Oregon.
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