Saturday, November 6, 2004

Somewhere Out There, cont.

XI

Whenever I’m driving, I hate it. I hate how organized the mess of it is. How there’s roads. Signs pointing you this direction and that. Stop signs. Stop lights, changing from green, going to yellow, bleeding to red. The line in the middle of the road, it just makes me want to cross it. I stare at it and it stares at me and it’s tempting me. Sometimes it’s uncontrollable. Something I can’t fight with the better instinct of me.

I always want to crash. All this power’s in the palm of my fingertips, it’s on this circular wheel that turns around and around as I pivot it to move the tires to take the turns, to move this machine whichever way I want. I just want to commandeer it into a building, crash into it at one hundred miles or more, cross my fingers, hope to die.

Especially when I’m in a cynical mood, when I’m a crazy bastard in that way, that’s when I want to crash. When I want to roar my car into something. Sometimes it’s a wonder if I get home, all the times I almost pivot into wide-eyed staring death, try to embrace it with open arms – times when I slightly turn but very much don’t turn into some object. It makes it a wonder when I avert death. When I fight the instinct.

I can’t stand it. It’s a teeming metal hell of cars scuttling all around. Polluting the air. Driving in their machines.

Our life’s like a car. We have our hands on it, we do control it to some extent. But there’s no steering wheel on it. We’re inside this machine – this society – and we just rev and rev all around, we keep driving, but along roads. We come to crossroads, we make limited decisions based on what society presents to us. What we have to do. All like Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” we make the decision to either take a path we don’t know, or do. One that’s worn, trodden, stamped on, or one that’s fading away.

The engine of our car – life – is the godforsaken self-perpetuation of the human spirit. That determination. That will. The fight in us. The endless takedown get up and keep trying until you get it. If we let our engine get rundown, inundated, then we stop moving along in life. We end up standing still. We end up just sitting in the metal hull of society with nowhere left to go, and only one thing to do.

To step outside of the machine. To die. To fall into the hands of the unknown and let it cradle us and rock-a-bye-baby us to the deathly aftermath.

When age shoddens us, when it destroys all we are or were, our old rusted now piece of shit car stops. Just stops. And we step out. And we truly walk alone, without the metal grip upon us, for the first time.

We become more alive in death than in life. We effloresce into nothingness. We deliquesce to meaningless. We lose all our organic matter on us – the skin, the organs, tissues, the cells – it goes away. What’s left is the frame of all we were, our skeleton. There’s our skull, our ribcage, our armbones, our legbones, fingerbones. Bones and bones, and more bones. This is the matrix of us, left behind. The inorganic part of us that supported us, just like the machine of society tried to do, but failed. All that’s left is the osseous. A rememberancer of what once was alive.

As Hamlet would say, “Alas, poor Yorick.”

I want to crash the car. I want to crash this life.

I can’t stand these cars. These round blurring wheels rotating and rotating on their axles. The engine making force to push it along. The brake stopping the force to slow down and stop at the stop lights, see the insidious red light blearing outward. The brakes that let us stop and yield our life’s elapse for a moment, contemplate our next course. The heater that offers dull warmth for the coldness of this overspanning machine.

Somewhere out there, someone’s dying. Someone’s breath is leaving them. Their car’s sputtering to a stop in the intersection, a dead hull housing them inside, old and shoddened, gray and grotesque from all these years cramped in their uncontrolled but so controlled car. This person’s no one special. They don’t even matter. They paid their dues and worked their time, they made their green lovely paper confetti and retired. They lived a life unlived. They lived in the narrow hellhole of their traveling hull of a ship until the reached the end.

He’s dying. His breath’s going. She’s lying in the bed old and gray eyes with cataracts. She’s rasping in air, coughing and sputtering and her heart’s stopping. It’s so sinister. All these lives taken. His life taken. Her life taken. All of this life taken for it – the machine. It won’t ever be satiated. Its existence will never end. Its control will never cease, an iron grip of wracking wrenching compressing steel. Beating and indoctrinating and inoculating cold appendages and tendrils and grasps and shoves and bellows.

I can feel it breathing on my nape, right now. I can feel it. Whispering in a clanking and asking to take everything I ever am.
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