I've got the music cranked. Atonal, loud, heavy beat. Shriekback. "The Bastard Sons of Enoch." The Devil said Caine I think this will fly. The driving requires concentration, focus, but it's a pleasant sort of focus, and while we're going fast--the night whipping past, streetlights now and exit signs--this is well within the safe capabilities of my seventeen-year-old five-speed Chevy.
Cement truck in the slow lane drifting on the curve. Dump the clutch and floor it; we skitter past at seventy and I laugh. Take my foot off the gas, upshift, glide it out until there's running room on either side.
Some asshole in a beamer decides to tailgate; I could move over but the lane I'm in forks in about a half mile and one fork is my exit.
I don't feel much guilt over ruining his night.
The lane forks. He tears past me. I downshift for the offramp and the flyover, the little truck kicking as it drops into fourth. We glide up and over--these ramps are deathtraps where there's ice, but it's a gorgeous August night, dry and cool. No worries.
Bitch of a merge, check the mirrors, hit the blinker, stamp on it and go. One eye on the rear view, one eye on the side mirror, one eye on the road ahead, both feet, both hands, check the blind spot, now. Lane change, hesitate, lane change, upshift! Wheee.
Into the canyons of the Yankee Expressway. Tunnel shit look at that guy in the Hyundai bend light! accelerate, lane change, decelerate, rough pavement, merge if you're gonna buddy, downshift, flyover, downshift now we all prefer and don't you agree a mechanical kind of ecstacy light, first gear, sirens on the cross street, wait right there, come off the clutch, one more hill, don't run in front of me you drunken bastard, right turn, left turn, right turn, home.
Lovely evening for a drive.
To a guy from 1800, I just described a field trip through Hell.
- Mood:
rejected - Music:O-Zone - Dragostea Din Tei
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Comments
Of course, it's still a major source of amusement to me to take all those who deride my city driving out for a ride in my kind of country. They're generally white-knuckled by curve #4: lane markers are for city kids, and brakes are for wimps.
It's always interesting to remember how alien our viewpoint can be, not just to people from a different time or place, but even to those who live in a different slice of our own world.
I wasn't speaking metaphorically.
Going the opposite way, I've often wondered what my life would have been like a couple hundred years back. My vision's crap to the point that I am, without corrective lenses, legally blind: can't read, can't make out faces, can navigate only with great care. Life would be rather different than it is now, I would imagine.
Catching that kind of disconnect in worlds is the essence of good sf and fantasy, imho. It's a pity I'm bad at it.
Any time before antibiotics, I would have died at nine years of age. Which, mercifully, would have prevented me from going functionally blind in my adolescence. (My eyesight is about as bad as yours; the family joke is that I need my glasses to find my glasses.)
So, yeah, right there with you.
You might be able to get Will Bill Hichcock to wet himself if given a ride on the back of a Harley in traffic, but i would like to hear your average biker's discription of a cavalry charge into massed artillery...
I just finished "The Gangs of New York", and i wonder if your average Gangsta Rapper would last too long in the days of the "Plug Uglies" or "The Dead Rabbits".
Our day is notable for how close to death you can be, while reclining at your comfort, drinking a beer and watching a video...
Bam! Milliseconds later, you are "hamburger all over the highway".
I'm talking about disorientation, not understanding what all this stuff is, the flashing lights, the loud noises, the crap us kids listen to.
To somebody from 200 years ago, a pickup truck doing seventy on a busy highway is about at weird as a so-called post-human world is to us.
It always takes all you have to cope.
Driving here is *fun.*
I haven't found it reasonable or safe to hit really hit a good pace anywhere I've been driving in the last ten years. Part of this is that CA hasn't kept up its surface roads in good enough shape, and the interstates are absolutely crammed with what the Aussies would probably call land-trains. You honestly can't drive at a good long-distance haul rate when the truckers are duking it out the entire length of I-5, blocking all four lanes of one-way road, and not about to take no for an answer.
Then there's the amateurs out there. Things are so cramped and crowded and overfull with people who never got any sort of driver's training, and really don't understand the physics involved.
"Veer across four lands of stop and go traffic at rush hour, why not, it's Mom's car, and I don't care!"
Alternatively, "Yes it's rush hour and I hate my job, and I hate all of you and I want to die now!"
And of course there's always the Honored Venerable Retired Guy on his cell-phone, who always gets a little confused between his gas pedal and his phone buttons and the garage opener doohickey that he can never sort out.
Of course you *enjoyed* scaring the heck out of those characters in your head who are from the 18th Century.
Seems only fair, given some of the horrors that they come up with. And some of it, I'd swear they just like to use to squick you with, honestly.
I have. (Shudders.) Traffic flow goes turbulent, with shock waves taking you from 70mph down to 20mph and back up again in about thirty seconds. At random.
I love this post. It's getting the linky linky treatment!!
There's a lovely little film called The Navigator, in which a little band of bewildered travellers from 14th century Cumbria tries to cross a four-lane highway in New Zealand. On foot.
Dragons would be so much easier.
Nine
Posthuman is a matter of perspective....
Anyhow - very nice.
I was just writing.
I'm apparently playing with it this weekend....