Riding in cars with voids.
Panicking on the highway, etc.
I hate driving and I hate being a passenger. Above all, I hate being in a moving vehicle. I’ll say it: cars are stupid. It makes me distinctly un-American to say this. I’m sure a lot of us would prefer to travel by high-speed rail, safe from exploding Teslas and every other threat on the road—which is to say, literally everything else on the road, since every object on the road is a threat. I aced my defensive driving course even if I failed at driving in the real world, I know things.
Late on Sunday night, one of our tires blew out on I-95. My husband was driving and our dog was (safely buckled) in the backseat. A guy drove next to us and rolled his window down to yell, “you blew a tire!” which we already knew because our car was no longer moving forwards in a steady way. It felt like limping but at 70mph. We were lucky and pulled over on the shoulder of an exit, but we couldn’t drive any further. There was a lot of smoke from the burnt rubber. At first, I didn’t panic. But then my husband tried to move the car like, a foot forwards and there was a semi-truck whizzing by and I yelled, “FOR FUCK’S SAKE!” which felt a lot more British than anything I’d ever say in a normal situation.
And then I really started to panic.
We were stuck on that exit’s shoulder. AAA said it could be anywhere from two hours to ???? hours before a tow truck could come to get the car off the shoulder, and the tow could only fit one person, so we had to find another way to get me and Osita, our trembling (reactive ass) dog, off the highway. “I can offer you a $20 Lyft voucher,” the AAA representative said. I think even if it were possible to call a Lyft to a highway exit ramp, it would be deranged to do so. So we started to scroll through our phones to find a hero.
(No, we didn’t have a spare tire or an emergency roadside assistance kit. Lessons learned.)
I haven’t really panicked in a long time. Not in years, not since the dark days of wedding planning and job searching. And even then, that was more depression and anxiety (snooooooooze, same old story, wah wah wah etc.)
This was different. The display on our car’s dashboard blurred and I felt choked in a distinctly unsexy way. It was hard to breathe or think and I was whimpering in a deeply embarrassing manner, like a child. One might’ve called it blubbering. Panic is so undignified. Instead of ‘fight or flight,’ your body goes into a fugue state. Your brain becomes a laptop with water poured all over the keyboard. You’re sweaty, useless, jittery, and non-sensical. Like Carrie Bradshaw or Morrisey, I couldn’t help but wonder, could life ever be sane again?
Jk—I was too stupid freaked out to wonder anything all.
Cars are tragic. My hometown has a lot of wreaths hung on stakes stuck in the ground on the sides of sharp turns. They’re vehicles (ugh) for American individualism and freedom, sure, but also for loneliness and isolation. Atomized lifestyles spent stuck in traffic going from one shitty place to another. I love cars in Lana songs and videos because she gets why they’re sexy—they bring you closer to death, annihilation. But Lana also is just a girl who really loves her truck, so perhaps I’m way off base.
We safely made it to bed around 3AM after a lot of pick ups, drop offs, AAA representatives and deep breaths. We abandoned the car on the side of highway so it could get towed later—an ‘unattended pickup’ is what they call it in the biz. But who gives a shit about a car?
It’s like Cher said: “getting off the freeway makes you realize how important love is.”
And I would love to stay off of it for as long as possible, thanks.
Anything with excessive Clueless references is A+ content.