Escape Characters

Quiet Vehicles

There's a pretty strong odor of gasoline. That can't be good. The car is twenty two years old. Aside from a distinct metallic rattle with the four wheel drive engaged, and the brake repair early last summer, the car is in good shape, considering. Though I should really get that checked out.

Cars remain sort of a mystery to me. Designed some hundred or so years ago, the general idea hasn't really changed. Sustained combustion, by means of a series pistons and valves rotating a number of things to keep the motor running and the wheels spinning. But for all its simplicity, its inner workings remain a mystery to me, due largely to a lack of trying. I spend so much time with other, more complicated machines, I suppose one becomes elitist. It's odd: my computing machines were invented around the same time, as well as coterminously came into public knowledge. Except, where my Turing machines were mathematical thoughts and theories on paper, cars had wheels, pedals, a physical interface by way of introducing to the world a complex machine with a simple interface. I guess my choice in machines is reflected pretty blatantly: my computer, despite nearly five years of abuse, is still holding strong, while my car is rusting away and I worry about how many brain cells I'm losing by walking near it. What's twenty two in computer years?

I have my radio off to listen to the rattle. I swear it is getting louder, though nobody who's ridden with me can hear it. That's fine. The rest of the vehicle doesn't exactly whisper, and I shouldn't expect them to be able to differentiate between the rattle of the tools in the backseat and something underneath the car. But with the radio off, it's definitely a bit quieter. More time to think, I guess, while the car warms up, or begrudgingly rolls down the road. Reminds me when I got my radio stolen in the Dodge Colt. Or when my Explorer was stolen, leaving me to the silence of dark Arizona bike paths. I guess I have a car. There's that. Now, if only the choke on the carburetor worked at all so I didn't have to sit in the car while it warmed up.

And so, staring at ice fog as I shiver in a too-thin coat, I'm thinking about mistakes I've made. Better time than any, I guess.

I'm thinking about a party I went to about a month and a half ago. I was invited to a party some friends of my parents were throwing. It was, sadly, one of those parties you commit to, only to be invited mere hours/days later to something else, which you'd much rather go to. I've been accused on a few occasions of being a terrible person in these types of situations, as I've at times rescinded my commitment in light of a more attractive one, or committing equal social blunders. For instance, somebody invites you offhand and last-minute to a dinner, of which your invitation is in hopes that you'll provide some companionship in an otherwise unknown void of social interaction. Then, minutes later, you get a call from your friends to go see the action film of the summer (or any movie, for that matter). Let's just say that in this situation, you were a jackass, and left your dining friend to fend.Looking for atonement, some years later, I decided to maintain my first commitment, even though I knew beforehand I would not have been missed. And I was right. When I showed up, the hosts were busy with other guests, the other guests were getting plastered, and my parents, who were about the only folks I knew at the party, were enjoying themselves just as well. I completed my initial party entrance protocol in a respectable time. I am then left to fend, to socialize, to mingle. This did not go particularly well. Loud music, inebriation, and an out-of-band vocabulary meant nobody could tell what I was saying. Social anxiety kicked in, and I defaulted to fidget mode: I get a bottle of water.

Only to meet someone we'll call Steve. Steve is hanging around a case of an import beer, of which he is making short work of.

Steve is a few years older than me. He hears that I went to Arizona State. He makes conversation, starting out relating to me his exploits, conquests, and generally "good times" while he lived around ASU for a few months. Things like, "Man, you know what I mean, I mean, how can you study with girls like that?" Others like, "I knew that I wasn't gonna get any education done, so I just spent my money on booze and partied every night." I may not have gotten out very often during college, but I'd met plenty of people like Steve. And honestly, if I didn't, I knew the stereotype. He was the gregarious, outgoing type everybody loves to know or share a beer with. The types that could pass their classes by making friends with the pretty/nerdy girls in the front row. The type that thrived on social interaction. Just about everything that I am not.

By the time I had determined this, he had finished a beer and had begun on a new one, while relating how he actually dropped out and spent a few months gaining an intense familiarity with the bar scene around Tempe and Scottsdale. Living off of funds from his parents for as long as possible, he eventually returned to Alaska to work construction, only to continue such a lifestyle, eventually getting a DUI and spending a few nights in jail. He explained to me, in addition to other fun tales about his cell mates, that some months later, he pulled strings with his family in order to get a full ride to an expense private college. Which, after five years of an English major, he still had two years, which he possibly could not finish due to poor academic performance and the extent to which he had drawn out his graduation.

Sitting in my car, still cold, some months later, I realized my mistake was in judging this party-goer, in mentally railroading him into an an embodiment of all I envied in those unlike me. He didn't realize this as I passive-aggressively drilled him about his novel he wasn't writing ("Why are you only two pages into your novel?"), or his thin grasp on 1920's American literature, of which had been his subject of study in his long all-expensive paid college experience. I was trying to expose him for his failures, in my own special, subtle, pointless way. And, in turn, was trying to hurt him by simply standing in outshining juxtaposition. All of which lost on him, as having finished off several more beers he had become pretty incoherent, and eventually grew tired of me asking questions about his studies.

Judgment, especially of others, was never something I was good at, but I guess I'd rather be out of practice. Human nature I guess. But where have my ideals gone? How have I gone from trying to accept people for what they are to subtly berating a drunk, failing writer? At what point did I go beyond accepting that I was different from others to the realm of thinking I was somehow better? Did I ever hold those ideals, or were they just some happy construct I convinced myself I held? Things I haven't been able to answer lately. Maybe that I've been getting five hours of sleep every night for the past week, but things are certainly muddier than when last I abandoned a friend and told myself I'd treat everyone with equal worth from them on.

I'll blame it on career life, or what I starting living of it lately. When I started becoming a vehicle for my own retirement. A younger man working to support a grateful older one. Where investments and salaries and benefits and pensions can quantify the worth of a person, rather than what they are and all they will be.

Goddamn. Definitely a gas leak.