Monday, November 17, 2003

A Stunning Realization

Since my crack-up on 9.27, the world has seemed a darker, more menacing place, inhabited by powerful cars and distracted, careless, even purposefully malicious drivers. All shouting into cell phones.

Yesterday, cowering in the passenger seat beside DK, an extremely careful driver, I realized that it's not going to get any better. Cars will not get fewer, less powerful, slower. Drivers will not become more cautious, more polite, less narcissistically hell-bent on their own itinerary, the world be damned. Cell phone users will not become fewer, more circumspect, less rude. It can only get worse.

The only possibility, it seemed to me, was to leave for less civilized parts. For my Ted Kaczynski cabin in the woods.

I've seen a TV ad lately in which a man is shaving a car. Well, not really shaving -- the elegantly dressed, continental-looking actor is running a sleekly designed, emmollient-dispensing electric razor over the fender of a beautiful, exotic, expensive-looking car. Cut to a close-up of the moisture trailing from the device, and evaporating. The man strokes the car several times. I will leave further deconstruction of this ad to those more schooled in French literary theory than I am. I simply offer it as an example of the fetishiztion of cars. As I offer the David Cronenberg movie as an example of the fetishization of car crashes. And this website as an example of the fetishization of the medical consequences of car crashes.

I had no idea I was such a sex kitten.

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