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Long before I ever got behind the wheel of a car, I was having nightmares about it. A lot of nightmares.
When I was really little, they were mostly dreams of horrible car wrecks where I was a passenger. They were never collisions with other drivers, instead they were dramatic veering-off-the-road numbers resulting from my parents' distracted driving or some inscrutable malice. I specially remember dreams about missing a narrow turn on a mountain road and tumbling down the face, getting crushed inside the car as it crumpled against the rock. I remember just as well dreams about being driven on a high, tremendously long bridge over a bottomless ocean. No land visible in any direction, just the bridge that carried us and the blue water to swallow us when we inevitably plowed straight through the guard rail like it was cardboard. Then the car sank, and never stopped sinking, far too fast for me to escape in time. Terror and fear for my life were a major mood in these dreams, but as I recall them, they had just as much to do with fatalistic melancholy. A placid dream from which I would wake up shaking.
Into adolescence, well before I started driving, I began dreaming of being the driver. Usually, nobody else was in the car with me. Unfailingly, I was having a horrible time of it. The fear for my life was still present, but a new element was dominating: embarassment. I *had* to drive, and there was no one else to do it for me, but I had no idea what I was doing. I was bumping into other cars left and right, coming away with an array of minor dents and crumpled fixtures which were somehow much more mortifying than the grotesque shapes the whole car would be crushed into in my earlier dreams. I knew that everyone else on the road knew how bad I was at this, and I wanted to plead with them for patience and understanding. Sometimes I did. Once, the car was inside of a bank (that most serious of boring adult institutions, shot with all the gravity of finance and the fear of its loss-- this bank was flamboyantly opulent, with gold panelled walls and fountains of lazy grandeur). Despite having no memory of how I had gotten into this mess, it was unambiguously my responsibility to get out of it. As cautiously as I could, backing up, turning, inching forward, turning so so slowly. Another common variant (which I confirmed with a friend that she frequently had too) was that it was up to me to drive the car, but I'm either in the front passenger seat or the backseat. Nobody's at the wheel, so I have to awkwardly reach over to drive, sometimes with limited visibility. Sometimes the brakes didn't work.
Let's jump forward a bit.
I had made a very bad decision under duress and got a subleased parking spot, there being no guaranteed parking around where I lived. It wound up being farther away than I had hoped for, so I had a 10 minute walk to my own car on days when I stayed at my apartment. There was something about that 10-minute walk that was singularly demoralizing; the bouquet of backpacks and luggage i was hauling didn't help either. It wasn't just the task, but also how dumb I must have looked, hauling three or four bags and drenched in sweat. I stayed at my partners' places as often as I could. There were a few reasons for this, but the fact was that the proximity of reliable parking was a *huge* reason I preferred sleeping elsewhere.
I just moved out of that place as I write this, and my new apartment complex has its own reserved parking lot. On the day I moved in, we understandably had no groceries in the fridge, so I went out for dinner. I took my keys, left the building, and took the 20 steps or so to my car. I drove it to a fast food place, ate my food there, then got back in, drove back up the road, parked it, and walked back in. And during that entire sequences, I felt so *powerful*. I felt *adult*. It sounds so silly when I write it now, but it was just palpable, and I know I'm not the only one who's felt this before. And not just the convenience or the independence, but also the prosthetic pleasure of smooth operation of a huge machine.
The feeling of mastery and independence is fragile and contingent. In my case, having to ask others about what this or that noise or dash light means is a common occurrence, but never pleasant. It's strangely vulnerable. Embarassing, even. It's the same feeling I had when I would mess up my computer and have to hand it over to my dad. I imagine having to show a doctor a genital wart would elicit that feeling, too.
I have a friend who's very knowledgeable about cars (unlike me), and in his nightmares, his car becomes a stranger to him. It's assembled according to some alien schema completely unlike what he's used to, and he can't predictably control it. This strikes me as a kind of fear made possible by his own intimacy and identification with the car; one that a non-expert like me would not have as strongly.
It's rare that I take pleasure in driving. Maybe that's why I don't dream about car crashes anymore, even though I've never been more likely to be in one than I am now. It's wild to step back and think about just how dangerous what I'm doing is. If some inexplicable nervous twitch jerked my arm and spun the steering wheel on the highway, that could be my actual death if not someone else's. People get in car crashes all the time. You can't forget about it, either. The highway, this place where I'll soon be spending an hour every workday, is littered with carcasses of animals and machines. Bruised and shredded and rotting. Every few miles, an incomplete story is written on the asphalt: skid marks veer off-road, then what happened?A gesture further still to the tragedies that left no traces, the shattered lives the road does not remember.
Roads are perhaps the public space where I spend the most time. Certainly it's where I encounter the most strangers. It's where I meet my city, but never face to face. Communication is circumscribed to gestures and blinking lights, faces are only glimpsed. I only know my fellow travelers by the slogans on their exoskeletons and the mistakes I've seen them make. Nobody is happy to be there. We are all in each other's way. We are potential risk factors for each other in both health and finance. It's profoundly anti-social.
Traffic jam. Hot day. We could get out and walk much faster than this. But we can't on account of this indespensible and costly contraption we're in that's suddenly two tons of dead weight.
Another friend's nightmares: miles and miles of asphalt. N-lane highways and boundless parking lots stretching to either side of the horizon. There is nothing here to sustain life. Even the air is poison. A hot wind blows.