I got my new license plates last night.
We put them on and I felt suddenly very naked.
Hm. Now anyone in my building might be able to search me out if they knew.
Anyone in my office (god forbid) might be able to, if they knew. I’m telling them all that it’s just an old nickname.
But for the average person on the street, driving by me, I really like it. They’ll probably not understand its meaning at all, anyway, and point to it to their drivers and say “what’s a Ecks-Eye - bee?”
For anyone who would read me first and then see my car go by, now THATwould be cool. There goes XIBEE! Who would know? Only a handful of people who are probably all pretty much in different cities. Two friends or so who could go “oooooh” when I drive them about. That’s about it. Would they actually say that? Only in jest.
Driving is an oddly isolating experience — both invigorating and false, enticing and flimsy. It creates empowerment, but not without separation.
The late Karl Hess, Barry Goldwater’s former speechwriter and counterculture guru, once talked about that with a friend and I when we visited him in his home, built into a hillside in West Virginia. He later put the same information into a small documentary film made about him.
He was talking about limousines, and how the world about you changes when you ride in a limo. The smooth officiality of riding poised on your leather seat across from someone (whether famous or not) whose interest you have garnered, the driver you inform to your whim of where to go, the masses outside to whom you are invisible behind your cooled tinted glass. He said there’s a kind of hypnotic trance that comes over you at that point. It convinces you, erroneously, that you have somehow “arrived”.
Just how much of it is that limousine?
…when you step onto the sidewalk with your entourage surrounding in your fine suits, you walk the shining polished wooden and marble hallways, and you buy into the life that says you are somehow more by means of its price, its venues, its food, its cars, its sycophants.
Have my license plates, my car done that? Strangely, in some small way, they have. If I were still the person I demonstrated in public in my youth, that thought would have been completely laughable. I walked everywhere, even great distances, and expected to live proudly in counterculture forever. My current job has connections to cars. When I got it, one of my best girlfriends from back in the day said simply: “YOU?… There?!??”
And it still hits my ear sideways. But it’s somehow true. I’m sure that everyone who attains glittering machines in life that they have seen, coveted, or bought feels this to some degree — that they won it; they deserve it, they fought for it, they are at a level, a rank, a platform of height.
It’s then about what you do with that that signifies you.
Some will gather their spoils about them and keep climbing, leaving older values in the dust. I can’t do that. I’m more like Karl, who left Capitol Hill to grow out his beard, barter his writing services or teaching lectures for the sheets of metal for his rooftop, or the dough-mixing vat which would become his bathtub, and trade his quiet wit for the solar panels that heated his water. He just couldn’t stay. There was just too much to get involved with. And he wanted to stay connected.
I have no problem with certain gifts of materialism if they create a little joy, and minimize woe for someone, and I crave that connection. It’s not fair to horde it all.
I feel like everyone in the world should come ride in my car and have their hair blown back by my kickass stereo.
I want to collect them from the bus stops …..I want to grab the little old Korean grandmas, I want to snatch up those punked out little museum girls, I want to give that tired Senora a ride home that I see waiting for the bus every day. Hey there’s the crazy senile guy from my building, he should come too. And there’s that same UCLA student in shorts who looks like he’s freezing and ready to blow away every day. If the world were more of a movie, and safer, and if there were parking spots along Wilshire Boulevard, I actually might have done so already.
So many things I wish, pedal goes with a swish, and away I fly before I can actually prove I’m real.
————-Cars——-
—do–
——————————-that.
Entries (RSS)