I have an early childhood memory of riding in a car with two of my adults, but without my brother. I think I was four or five and it was probably 1969 or 70, but I'm not sure and there's no one for me to ask.
We were winding our way through the West Virginia mountains and were forced to go very slowly because the car in front of us was barely creeping along. The steep mountainous roads were narrow, full of cutbacks and blind turns and it was impossible to find a passing zone; there was nothing to be done other than to follow the slow car at it's own pace. In hindsight, it had to have been going pretty slow; we were in a VW Beetle and I don't think that little car was much of an uphill racer.
I was in the backseat, reading comic books and I wasn't really concerned about going fast or getting anywhere. During my childhood I moved a lot. I was always going somewhere I didn't want to, often without any warning at all, so a slow ride to
nowhere was fine with me.
I had my books, that is where I wanted to go.
My adults were considerably more tense.
"Goddamn son-of-a- fucking bitch, get off the fucking road!", screamed the male adult behind the wheel.
Where? How? There's a forest on one side and a cliff on the other.My driving adult started honking the horn. Honk! Honk!
The car in front of us maintained it's sluggish speed.
"You stupid fucking asshole! Drive, you dumb motherfucker!" Honk! Honk!
Then he started tailgating the car, pulling to within a few feet of it's rear bumper. I looked up between the two seats to see what all the shouting was about and saw that the car in front had two elderly people in it and the female passenger had turned around in her seat and was looking at us.
It was a look of fear. She was trying to mouth some sort of message, a plea or explanation.
She ended with a weak, apologetic smile and held up her hand, palm facing us.
Calm down please. Stay back a bit, OK?"Goddamned stupid fucking wrinkled old cunt," yelled my adult. Then he gave the old lady the finger. She blanched , turned around and said something to the gentleman who was driving. His panicky eyes reflected back at us in his rear-view mirror. He reached for something with his left hand.
In front of us, the car's Hazard lights started flashing.
Inside our vehicle, my adult was screaming bloody murder. He was preparing to throw a half-empty beer bottle
forward through our open sunroof.
"Don't," said my other adult, a woman whose name I cannot recall.
She reached for the man's arm and our car swerved, almost colliding with a Ford Econoline coming the opposite direction. The driver of the van honked his horn, cursing us with his finger.
The two adults started yelling at each other and I went back inside my comic book.
After some time, we came to an overlook and the car in front of us pulled off the road, allowing us to pass. My adult cursed some more and flung the now-empty bottle out of our car as we sped by, the tiny VW engine revving in the trunk behind me.
I don't recall where we were going or where we were coming from, but I do remember one thing: I remember what I was told after we got there.
My female adult found a moment to talk to me alone. She thought that the man's violent display of anger and rage might have upset me and she wanted to comfort me. This yelling and throwing wasn't anything unusual in my experience, but she didn't know that, so she tried to explain an idea to me. An important idea.
"
Allan, I want you to remember something. I want you to remember how [ my male adult] acted when we were on that road. When you are old enough to drive, you will be stuck behind cars just like that and I want you to remember this. This is important."
Important enough to stop reading Spider-Man?"
Yes. Put the book down. You see, sometimes cars break down and they can't go very fast. Sometimes cars get tired or sick or wear out and when they go up and down hills it is hard for them to go the same speed as the cars around them. But unless you are in that car, you can't tell what's wrong with it. There might be nothing wrong with it at all and it might the hill that is the problem, but you can't know that. Yelling and screaming at it isn't going to help it move any faster, the car can only go as fast as it can go. Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you?"
Yes, I lied, and returned to Spider-Man's world.
Today, I am ashamed to admit that I do not know who this woman was. I feel a sting of guilt and humiliation because she was trying very hard to teach me something and it took me over thirty years to understand it. Back then, I had no idea what she was talking about- all I wanted to do was read my comics. I didn't care about cars, all I knew of cars is that I seemed to live in them nearly as much as I lived in houses.
Like cars, houses sometimes broke and stopped working and the proper adult thing to do in either case was to yell, scream, get drunk and break things- in no particular order. That's what grown-ups did.
And when I grew up, that is what I did. Because I had forgotten what she said.
It wasn't until I found myself driving a fucked-up old Plymouth station wagon up a long, steep grade on a very similar stretch of road that I even recalled her words, much less understood them. The old beater was straining and it still wouldn't do more than 35, which was the posted limit, I believe.
It wasn't long before a trail of vehicles had queued up behind me, honking and flashing their headlights. I'm sure there was cursing, but I had one eye on the road and the other on the thermostat and couldn't hear them over the engine's death rattling...my car was
struggling.
When the road widened to include a third lane, the parade of cars that passed each took their turn at cursing me .
Some of them yelled.
Some of them flipped the bird.
Others did both.
Every single driver had a deep and personal anger, hatred really,and it was directed at me- just for being on the same road as them. I was going as fast as I could and I wasn't breaking the law. I was just
there and they hated me for it. It was mean in spirit, and worse, it was
cruel. It reminded me of the past and that is always cruel. To some degree, anyway.
I wasn't in much better condition than the car that I was driving at that time. Circumstance and addiction had put me in a dark and haunted place, and by the time the last car- a BMW convertible driven by a woman who would have been beautiful if she hadn't been yelling "
motherfucker!" at me- passed by, I was devastated. I arrived home in tears and went straight to the bottle and stayed there until all thoughts of screaming, all sights and sounds of honking cars and women who hated me had been blotted from my mind.
I was forgetting when I should have been remembering.
A lot of time has passed since then, but I remember what the mystery woman was trying to tell me. I know those words. I don't recall when they started making sense to me, but they do now.
It's not complicated.
It's simple. It applies to everything we do and since what I am doing
right now is blogging, I will try to apply her wisdom to that.
Imagine that blogging is a sort of road- an internet highway, if you will.
Catchy metaphor, eh?
Let's consider
blogs as cars and
bloggers as drivers.
Imagine that there are thousands of lanes on this highway- more lanes than traffic could ever need. Most of the lanes are clear in both directions as far as the eye can see.
Now picture a sedan plugging along on the
shoulder of this vast road. Maybe it's going as fast as it can, maybe not; in any case it's off the main lanes and it isn't blocking anyone. There are no flares or SOS signs.
In a passing car, another driver sees this, peels off the highway and slides onto the shoulder behind the slower vehicle. The driver follows the sedan at a distance of less than five feet.
From that close it's easy to read the bumperstickers on the leading car.
The stickers identify the politics, spirituality and sexuality of the car's driver, as well as a half-dozen other traits and opinions specific to that person.
They aren't the same as those of the driver of the second car.
So the driver of the second car starts cursing at the car in front. Personal words based on information scanned from stickers - words of hatred and rage, wielded like a weapon; a full-auto, hi-capacity handgun of hate. Aimed at the back of a stranger's head.
They honk their horn: HONK! HONK! GO FASTER!
And they curse: MOTHERFUCKER! I HATE YOU!
In the first car, the driver looks behind them and wonders:
Why don't they just pass me?There are a hundred empty lanes. Why the hell are they yelling at me?
Meanwhile, back on the highway, cars roll by.
Some of the drivers look over and ask:
-What is that asshole yelling about? -Why don't they just get back in their own lane and keep moving?
-
Don't they have anything better to do?When I see hateful, harmful and even abusive unsolicited comments left on the blogs of others, I tend to form a very low opinion of the person who left them.
Do you see them too?
What do you think?
It makes me think of a mad driver, too preoccupied with someone else's bumperstickers to notice that they themselves are driving erratically, swerving dangerously close to the cliff on the far side of the shoulder.
YELL! HONK!
Swerve.
There's a squeal of tires, a shriek of metal as the guardrail gives way.
10,000,000 lanes to choose from and some will always choose the cliff.
And they will honk all the way to the bottom.
A Two Car Family Of One
I Want My DTV!
