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Asphalt, unlike the cruelty of memory, is clean and pure. It slithers away until you are lost and the only thing left is the hypnotic purr of an empty souless engine and the vibration of an unbalanced tyre.
I've often wondered why driving seems such an integral part of life, providing such rich opportunity for petrol scented meditation. If there was a way to sever this umbilical noose, this desire to follow narrow black tarmac lines, and just stop and find a place that I didn't just want to drive away from again, then maybe I would.
I sometimes speculate as to where the serpentine skid marks would take me. Swerving across the broken white lines, off the road, and through into someone else's world. A downshift into someone else's catastrophe. Perhaps one day I'll follow them, hands off the wheel, in a slow-motion-action-replay-crash-dive. Waiting for the taste of impact, hungry for the crash.
I woke up in a pool of engine oil and drove headlong into a rainbow, into the sweet sharp air of anticipation, and traffic as thick as molasses. Only to discover that on the other side was the same dull amber of lights and the red stream of brakes. Perhaps I had missed my chance.
But I can smile, gridlocked in my 1500rpm idle speed stasis, and lie to myself about the future and the girl in my peripheral vision. Maybe this was all periphery and I am blind to the one thing that everyone else can see. But as the carbon monoxide seduces my optic nerve and the clutch plate gently atrophies, all I can remember to do is smile at the perfect conformity of internal combustion and the storm clouds on the horizon.
First gear... accelerate…
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After
being dragged around behind a tractor, searching for substance,
this piece became a continuation of the fabled quest for revelation.
To some peoples relief it also brought closure to the whole risk-taking
episode. Despite the belief that one should suffer for their art,
whiplash and a displaced vertebra are a little bit too much on
the side of suffering.
There comes a point when you have to reconnect with somewhere
someplace, anywhere.
And if that's a brutal connection, then so
be it.
Special thanks to Ross Baker for technical assistance.
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