Car in South Dakota

Somewhere in the middle of the night in America, I sit in my blue rental car in a 24-hour fast food parking lot, munching curly fries and drinking boiling coffee, trying to stay awake for the next hundred miles. I’m reading Ballard’s Crash for the first time:

He dreamed of ambassadorial limousines crashing into jack-knifing butane tankers, of taxis filled with celebrating children colliding head-on below the bright display windows of deserted supermarkets. He dreamed of alienated brothers and sisters, by chance meeting each other on collision courses on the access roads of petrochemical plants…

I close the book, toss the greasy bag, and race toward the state line. Despite my hatred for cars and their effect on our cities, I could drive around this country forever, just looking at things.

Flying is a white-knuckle affair for me. One day I hope to board an airplane without reliving David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity‘: Tell my wife I love her very much… I know the safety statistics by heart yet they provide little comfort. Knowing that I’m more likely to die in front of my computer or while taking a shower only gives me something else to worry about. These factoids underscore the lack of control in our lives.

On the road, there is control. Left or right. Memphis or Tulsa. Sixty or eighty. Sometimes I’ll pass a crumpled car along the shoulder of the road or flung out into a field like a warning. For a moment, I’ll worry that I put too much faith in my driving abilities and in the abilities of others. But it’s a fleeting thought because then I kick it up to eighty-five and start bouncing along some chewed-up county road, zooming past roaring semi-trucks, snapping photographs, and dodging shredded tires.

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Road Techno Item #1:

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Audion – I Am The Car
Spectral, 2009 | buy it
2009 marked the summer of Audion, as Matthew Dear delivered four heavyweight singles in as many months. “I Am The Car” was the opening salvo and it’s an unassuming slowburner built from dark metal and gliding lights. And it performs brilliantly on the road.