Cars

God sometimes I feel so cool in my car!

I feel so cool driving 70 miles an hour in my '98 Honda Civic, Esmeralda, on I-5, barreling past Boeing Field. I feel so cool changing lanes while wearing aviator sunglasses, heading northbound, coming over the hump and seeing downtown and the Olympics and Elliot Bay. I feel so cool accelerating while changing radio stations, searching for something more my mood's tempo. It takes a lot for me to not think about the negative in life, and in cars: the emissions, the selfishness of my driving alone ("Remember Nicaragua, Sean?!"), the lonely, all-American effects of putting the road at the center of it all. But: when it's sunny, and I find a song that feels like a soundtrack to the film that is my biopic, and I can imagine this biopic opening with this very drive, this very moment, with the gritty work-a-dayness of Erin Brockovich, but better, and the charm of this moment is extra charming because the audience generalizes it as a daily event of my splendid existence, then I can forget the negatives, and I just experience this sheer American pleasure in my Japanese car.

All my bumperstickers that declare my loves and frustrations with my city, my hula-ing Barack on the dash, my skein-cracked windshield: all these add to the myth and the mystique that is me when I drive, and if no one else feels it or sees it--and I assume no one else does--well goddamnit, I do. When I drive, under the right circumstances, I feel legendary.

I have driven for almost half my life now, and I have been a passenger all of it, and I have seen the backs of millions of automobiles. Accords, Landcruisers, Explorers, Cavaliers, Civics, Mustangs, Maximas. Silver name plates and little silver symbols subsidized by us to keep social hierarchy alive. I always like driving next to someone who drives the same model as me and in the same color. As I drive up I-5, I look over at him. Do we have similar jobs? Girlfriends? Values? Peeves? He speeds forward or pulls back, and I'm driving alone again.

When I was 20, I drove my stepmom's 1981 Toyota Corolla. At a stoplight, an African man pulled up next to me, other African men packed in the car with him, and he was pointing at my car and laughing and smiling. Unable to reach the passenger window to roll it down, I just looked at him, confused, and not smiling. The light changed; he drove forward, still smiling, and I saw then that we drove the same exact car in the same color. I believed then he was a recent immigrant to this country, and I just thought how he might've been coming from war-torn Somalia, and he pulls up next to a man in America, in the same car, and in the same color, and this Somali man can afford the gas here, he's got a job, and his kids are in school. Life ain't horrible, and look at this goofy miracle. Look what capitalism can do! Look what strong government can do! Look at how crazy life can be when it all works just even decently well! Life is good; God is great.

I wish I had smiled. I wish I had reciprocated his joy because I understood it, even back then when I understood so little: life ain't horrible, and all of this is a goofy miracle.

All the backs of all the cars and all the little heads that pop over a headrest on the left-hand side. All their flesh and blood and bone seated comfortably in a heap of steel or aluminum or whatever cars are made of now. All the thoughts that must be circulating at 65 MPH: thoughts of the Mariners and suicide, jealousy and DVR, how to pay the bills this month and how to live. I sometimes imagine while on the freeway that all the cars suddenly become invisible, and all the humans, seated, hover above the ground, and then the invisible carrier dissolves and the humans shift fluidly from hovering to walking, and we're all out there now, walking in our lanes, and suddenly our mystery is gone. We've lost the mystique. The car has given us all mystery; our private world is out there in the lanes, as secluded as a nook.

It's amazing we can clog hundreds of miles of highway at various points in the day. All the autos that clog up the serpentine concrete. We start and end in our little driveways, so homey, so familiar, and the highway out there is a cold, emotionless reptile. Pleasurable like angry love. There you are free; there you are alone; there you can do what you want, though what you truly want, which you've already achieved, is miles from that highway.

Oh, all the millions of rears of cars I've seen! Dented taxies in Guererro, exhausted school buses in Managua, the rare and fine Ferrari, all the bug cars I loved as a kid in West Seattle in the '80s. So many Civics and so many Fords, so many Nissans and so many semis. To think of the rears of cars is to realize insignificance: the constant constant flow of humanity, the antness of it all when looking from the heavens, the aloneness of being you, the importance of feeling legendary.