My Car Madness
Seven years ago I flew to Oakland California and bought a 1994 BMW station wagon. The wagon had a strange clunk between 1st and 2nd gear. I bought it anyhow. As I would soon discover, it was also infested with spiders. I already had a BMW sedan, a pickup truck and an old BMW motorcycle but for some reason I must needs a forth vehicle to get around. I remain baffled and embarrassed by this strange short era in my life. I do not own any such vehicles now. What was this car madness? What unthought motivation caused me to hoard these German automobiles? I drove the wagon back across the country and nearly died in Death Valley when the overheating car would barely make it up the steep roads winding up the valley walls. The country unfurled before me in an immense orange dream of rifts, chasms, hazy buttes, vast up-drifting distances. We have tricked ourselves into needing cars for such landscapes and yet there is nothing more romantic—nor more depraved—than racing down those long desert highways in a gas powered air-conditioned pod (my AC did not work very well). I slept in the car at night and woke up with painful spider bites. Each morning between the head rest and the roof there appeared large and iridescent webs. Back home in Minneapolis I did not know where to park the car. One assumes that driving an agile vehicle is the apotheosis of autonomy, the literal seat of the ego. But as I think of it now, it is as if these cars, this truck and this motorcycle were thinking me, as if I had relinquished my will to them; they made decisions on my behalf; I was automated by the autos; driven by an alien intention.
my 1994 BMW stationwagon
