I hate cars
People who spend time in them bore me when they start spouting numbers at me I don’t understand. I used to work at a café with a German mother of two who wouldn’t shut up about how she and her husband had illegally tuned their car, I should admire their bravery in the midst of adversity from what I perceive to be adequate restrictions by the government.
You’re gonna get those kids killed, and you don’t even know it. She kept bragging about her second car as if she didn’t complain to the boss behind my back, telling her I kept reading books at work. She didn’t understand that I grew up in a car-less village, and that I probably have dyscalculia, so all those numbers and words meant nothing.
What is it with car bros, anyway? They give female names to their cars and I’m supposed to remain polite and not pathologize their fetish just a little bit? I bought a NASCAR hat in some backwater second-hand shop in New Hampshire last summer (the south of the north, as they call it). I wear it on the street as a litmus test for men who wouldn’t think twice about fucking their Dodge Vipers in the exhaust pipe when the wife’s asleep. YOU LIKE NASCAR? They ask me with the lobotomized smile of a child watching his favorite superhero on screen. I enjoy bursting their bubble with laughter so loud it shames the naive. I grew up in a village with no cars, I hate those shits! My grandfather was a taxi driver for most of his life. He became a chauffeur for the American Embassy, having once driven around Hemingway, a fact neither him, nor my dad had ever managed to not bring up regularly (and me, I guess, too). I had sex in a car once, it was physically uncomfortable. I disliked the experience and with it myself. I didn’t deserve it.
I get scared when I’m driven too fast. Dominican drug dealer always drove fast when the car was loaded with weed, music blasting loudly. He’d do it to impress the ladies, I felt like I was in a crashing plane. My brother got hit by a car, my dad got hit by a car, and I tend to stay away from them. I’ll never get a license because I like to drink, I know myself well enough to crash a car, and I simply don’t have the money or erotic affection that would make buying a car worth it. I understand, it’s the machinic womb, the only safe space where you can sing, cry, and yell to work, your little zen place. That’s fair. I just like to walk and smoke too much for that. I’ll be there in an hour, by bus.
