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I am working on a something - a book. A book buried deep in my recently recovered passion for automobiles, a book that seeks to explore my seemingly random interest in the matters of the wheel and also that of my country. Scribblings, now, and questionaires - fleshing out concepts, directions, a lot of planning. Am enjoying myself tremendously and find myself again charging wildly both through my own history as well as to the top of my plucky, little car's tachometer.
What I am on about most recently is Dream Cars.
Lust is a good emotion, I approve of it. Though it beguiles and confuses, though it will bend you to it, some over-eager tango partner grabbing at your thigh, it is terribly honest at the point of creation - a vibrant, reasonless want; the body's chemical bloom as it responds to something that is particularly beautiful to you.
In all the world only two things evoke it for me and I consider myself likely ununique in this regard - all the slinking lines of girls and cars. Am most enamored, come the end of day, of the frames of women - how they are set, the stance that allows for all that soft and silking shape; hips, shoulders, the neck swoop - and all these things draw me to cars, as well. How either of them move at pace, how they sit askance regard or under it, the way the light smashes along the length...delirious. These things make me delirious.
I allow that there are hues to consider, the skin and ways in which the body swells - I rather like the swells...and what it is that makes one move, be it lady or Lambourghini, will matter eventually...but those are high mind things. I am talking of the animal ripple - the senseless thing that masquerades as need and makes me, us, so wonderfully fool in it's shadow.
Here's a visual aid - it's called an Aston Martin Vanquish V12 and I desire it.
Just look at it - the almost lurid stance, the simple athlete in the lines; if one knew nothing about the torrid monster under the hood, this car would still promise speed, would still incite the light to run along it's length and the eye to chase right after- it makes me stupid, this car, it makes my mouth water; it's like some impossible dancer twisting just outside the span of arms.
My dream cars are not sensible, it is not love I feel while wrenching my head around in traffic, daring a smash for a momentary glance at some slice of sheet metal - it is lust, smashing distracted young men and women into doorframes as the eyes sprint raggedy after a hip or a chin or a faint of skin.
What I wonder is where the dream car has gone off to. As entwined as we are as a nation with the automobile - the birthright of the license, the somewhat diminished ritual of the 'first car', it seems the automobile occupies very little of our collective heart - for all the people I have asked this question after, simple, what car it is that excites them, that takes them, that they would have if only...justt a handful of people have an answer.
When I began this mental dialogue, I was most concerned with whether or not our dream cars were fair to ourselves - if it was good to create an idyllic paradigm in youth, to set a goal like that without knowing the stakes or what was involved; if the car one chooses to drive says something about someone, and I believe it does, then it follows that the penultimate car of desire would say rather a lot more. Did the car we longed for change, did it say more about who we were than who we hoped to become - was it about assigning a form to who we wanted ourselves to be or whom we hoped other people saw us as....so many questions.
Yet what became more pressing was the absence of the idea. I have a clear picture in my head of the evolution of my dream cars - how they changed as my vision of the world expanded, how my priorities changing were reflected in sheet metal and hub flares - what follow is a smattering of those shifting ideals, the vehicles whose ownership never seemed likely, but who nevertheless stirred my heart and wrenched my head dangerously around.
1996 Chevrolet Impala SS
1987 BMW M6
1987 Karen Gillan....*cough* - you get my point.
There is a part of the brain that doesn't care - that ignores reason, that refuses to know what it ought - about expensive cars, about famous girls you'll never meet - and opts instead to treat all the beautiful things as mothfire - to grab us and throw us brutally towards the fire knowing full well we wont ever get there. Eye lightning and the streaks it leaves across the mind - that, that is where the dream cars throttle and barrel through the dark.
I worry only that, like wild mustangs out bundling across the plains, no one would argue they were wonderful - simply that they could never imagine what it would be like to ride.
I am a proponent for the idea that you are not more than you want and that what you want, your body will tell you. Mothers, I think, know some of this - how it is in carrying about young that needs will come clear; cravings, in the vernacular, a bubbling urge for some...thing...that the mind does not exactly know itself.
I'm supposed to love Bloody Marys, I am told.
The carriage shifts, thoughtless, to our desires - how the hips turn, the shoulders dip or crane to show. I cannot imagine how fool I look when you sit down next to, all marionette and fidgeting in your impossible hereness - the waking mind does not tell me where to shift my feet, it doesn't straighten my back and slouch me mounting in my chair; blinking as you go into the peculiar way this wall has me leaning to it, as if starting upon a stranger's couch too early in some morning.
And I dream. The presumptions of my deep mind are that you are mostly how you have acted around me - my dreams rarely enact changes in people, we are mostly who I know us to be. But you are in places unexpected, wearing things that make little afternoon sense and you say things I am thinking, not things you are thinking. This nightyou, who sits calmly with me in a long dark, who stretches and liquids through my sleep.
What I know I keep.
Textcast from the Precinct Bar, Union Square, Somerville, MA
Olympic ceremony....Mexico! Population: 110 million! Athletes:....1.
Even the ugly girls on the New Zealand olympic team are hot. They are winning the fly-lympics so far.
Its great fun, Bryan Williams (it must be noted that I was drinking and managed to merge Brian Williams the Canadian reporter and Bryan Adams the singer into one person) is now leading a collection of Native Canadians in some sort of rollicking sing a long. New Zealand handily won the She's-Fly-Lympics and I'm drinking at Precinct with some buddies, how you?
What sort of reasons? Is it gaudily clad olympic athlete withdrawal? I think I can help.
There is some legit Lord of the Rings shit going on in the opening ceremonies.
we are entering the 'giant glowing bear' stage of the evening. I am predicting the wizard from earlier is going to tame it, or befriend it, whatever a Canadian would do. Perhaps tax it heavily but give it great benefits.
In more upbeat news the stadoum (ahh, drink) is overrun with what must be called spirit penguin.
aand spirit orca...big ones...in the snow. This is intense.
The stadium has sprouted totem-trees, which seem to have summoned Sarah Maclachlan...likely here to save the spirit penguins.
this ceremony is pretty awesome, probably moreso because I am at a bar with a reggae band playing and cant hear the actual music. They had a giant holographic/magic orca swimming through the place a bit ago..and there was a wizard...some sort of snow wizard.
hunter moon motif....with violin-playing cloud viking. Not making this up. Viking. Cloud canoe.
possibly playing the local favorite Devil went up to Calgary if the horns are any indication.
He just lost the helmet and has a mohawk, now there is a lady fiddler, the stadium is now constructed of holographic mapleleafs..oh, this is the cape breton poriton of the night, at least I understand now.
all much weirder with the slow, bedframe breaking reggae beat.
the viking is very metal, even while step dancing. I couldnt make this up. Not even me.
all the dancers have set their heels on fire and are hard shoeing, there is a lot of orange lightning annnnd they actually went to commercial.
Canadian petern pan stands in a field of wheat, space-walking the hologram....i'll assume this is Saskatchewan...aannnd he's flying...
The canadian peter pan, for the record, wears a lot of denim.
we have spirit horses...and upon closer inspection of his earring, C.P.P. miiight dig dudes. Whoa, storm mountain rave scene!
the canadian creation myth appears to center largely around glow sticks and flying boys.
flying boys with snowboards.
We're at a lull...still just flying boys and snowboards around a giant montage filled mountain.
we have roller-blades. has Charles given any indication why he isn't speaking? Did you tell him about the spirit orca?
the roller-blading folk might be a Tron tie-in, there is a lot of body light going on here.
now the univerce is centered by a kalaidoscope pillar of energy and there is a reasonably fat man with a neckbeard and a beret talking on top of it.
He has gathered a throng of white suited native canadians to him and apears, if the holograph montage is any indicator, to be telling them about Toronto.
It's been busy, lately, and I have.
I can't bring myself to cut my hair. We are approaching, as though at sea, seeing it only through stars and charts, a year.
I think I will let it grow until then and then I will make a decision.
I no longer question that he loved me, just feel this sadness occasional bundling that he never managed to tell me.
I worry I have broken the bone that cares that you read what I say.
Pouring over these poems that other people write,
watching the way we choose to fix the window
through which we are perceived
it is so obvious, your love
the way she moves in your mind
and she knows.
So the truth is dressed, the angle tilted
you play at being obscure, vague
the dim, one-language
of the constantly waking up at night
I do not write her letters anymore.
Feel defeated, completely, by knowing she knows -
how it is we do not talk, the way we do not smile
the absence entire of touch
so I move away from the sound
no longer entertain it.
It pains me to see you do it still,
how many years from that first glance
some joyous accident in body
why do we not let this go?
Silence is not love.
The things she leaves unsaid
unwritten
the lipless, duskwords you read into -
these are not a window you have climbed through
this is nowhere for you to sleep.
This is more a list of things that, with the New Year rolling in, I intend to do or pay better attention to...let's call them...'Resolutions'.
shit.
1. Talk less in public.
2. Talk significantly less when I am by myself...ideally not at all. Baby steps.
2a. Listen better - what a neat trait, 'being a good listener', what an unfortunate thing to realize you are not.
3. Better manage grief.
4. Look at the horizon when walking - this is pretty neat and you should try it, unless you do it already, in which case you should look at a constantly shitting spot of ground 5 feet in front of you while you walk, for the sake of comparison.
5. Bullshit less, personal life, job, etc - this is a broad call to competency and production, i.e. write more, read more, be better, boast less
6. Stop biting my nails - not just that, manicure them, keep them clean, be classier, be space shuttle level.
7. Get back into college - don't let it be 2011 with a bunch of excuses.
8. Make less excuses by avoiding their necessity.
9. Hair cut?
10. Realistically pursue publication.
I don't generally roll into the new year intent on changing a lot - though I am not a great manifester of dynamic change in my own life, I tend to be consistently aware of the things I would like to be and how - or at least, have been over the last few years. Perhaps settling into this new 12 month stretch isn't a bad way to jump start it, though.
Another should be attempting to stop categorizing the things my brain does in piles of 'correct', 'weakness' and 'unacceptable' - here's me looking at this wide world viewing the turning of a particular moon around the earth as some revelation of change...I can't shake how little the thing we are standing on, and the vastness through which it hurtles, cares about a disco ball falling off the top of a building in New York.
Pessimism is, I think, so comforting because it is readily applicable in every situation. Let's get rid of that, too, shall we?
Tuesday, June 16, 2009 at 1:47pm
Written By Regina Brett, 90 years old, of The Plain Dealer, Cleveland , Ohio
"To celebrate growing older, I once wrote the 45 lessons life taught me.
It is the most-requested column I've ever written."
My odometer rolled over to 90 in August, so here is the column once more:
1. Life isn't fair, but it's still good.
2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.
3. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.
4. Your job won't take care of you when you are sick. Your friends and
parents will. Stay in touch..
5. Pay off your credit cards every month.
6. You don't have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.
7. Cry with someone. It's more healing than crying alone.
8. It's OK to get angry with God. He can take it.
9. Save for retirement starting with your first paycheck..
10. When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.
11. Make peace with your past so it won't screw up the present.
12. It's OK to let your children see you cry.
13. Don't compare your life to others. You have no idea what their
journey is all about.
14. If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn't be in it.
15. Everything can change in the blink of an eye. But don't worry; God
never blinks.
16. Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.
17. Get rid of anything that isn't useful, beautiful or joyful.
18. Whatever doesn't kill you really does make you stronger.
19. It's never too late to have a happy childhood. But the second one is
up to you and no one else.
20. When it comes to going after what you love in life, don't take no
for an answer.
21. Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie.
Don't save it for a special occasion. Today is special.
22. Over prepare, then go with the flow.
23. Be eccentric now. Don't wait for old age to wear purple.
24. The most important sex organ is the brain.
25. No one is in charge of your happiness but you.
26. Frame every so-called disaster with these words:
'In five years, will this matter?'
27. Always choose life.
28. Forgive everyone everything.
29. What other people think of you is none of your business..
30. Time heals almost everything. Give time time.
31. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.
32. Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
33. Believe in miracles.
34. God loves you because of who God is, not because of anything you did
or didn't do.
35. Don't audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.
36. Growing old beats the alternative -- dying young.
37.. Your children get only one childhood.
38. All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.
39. Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.
40. If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else's, we'd
grab ours back.
41. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.
42. The best is yet to come.
43. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.
44. Yield.
45. Life isn't tied with a bow, but it's still a gift."
Its estimated 93% won't forward this. If you are one of the 7% who will,
forward this with the title '7%'.
I'm in the 7%.
Remember that I will always share my spoon with you!
Friends are the family that we choose for ourselves.
1987 BMW M6
