The speaker is restless and wants to escape a room where even the broom seems to have given up on him. So he heads out in a Crown Victoria fitted with a spotlight, a car that suggests a cop or a searcher, though he seems to be hunting nothing in particular. The things he finds are absurd: ghostly figures in old-fashioned hats, armadillos in cutoff shorts, empty bottles in the gutter. Time passes in cheeseburgers and palm trees, and it slips away behind him in the mirror.
The mood is dreamy, funny, and a little lonely. Humor covers a sense of drift, and the title hints that freedom to go anywhere may just mean going nowhere. Even the radio offers scraps pulled from the trash. The last lines, mixing up "carp in a barrel" with "curriculum vitae," read like a joke about a confused mind, but they also suggest he can't tell being trapped from having a career, or a plan.