Autophobia

I am a freak. In so many ways. Let me choose one.

One of the most striking to me is the fact that I have ever, not even for a second wanted..

...to own a car..!!

That automatically makes me a freak in the eyes of most people in this Society.

I half heartedly took some driving lessons. I probably will again. Its good to know how to drive isnt it? Apparently. Though I feel this is someone else's logic and not really mine, at work.

The whole culture of cars repels me to be honest. I love the aesthetics of the vintage cars (anyhting pre 1980 really) but  it is really just that. An aesthetic appreciation, the way I would look at a sculpture or a tree or an antique chair.

The entire  'rite of passage' distortion..sorry..period in our teens, with learning to drive passed me by. I was oblivious.

Where was I? What  the hell could I have been thinking?

As I recall I was writing and painting and living with great intensity at the time, this just seemed a lot more important to me. life was full of things, Important things I urgently needed to do.

Having sex. Taking drugs. Travelling round Europe. writing. painting. Talking to interesting people.

Hours spent tediously  fusing  myself to machine. For what?

I think it was just another one of those collective conventions that I thought about and just  rejected as mindless.

Driving just seemed so damn boring and nullifying to me. Stepping into some commodfied zone of sterile onanistic gratification.The pleasure derived is purely selfish but  viscerally powerful because cars connect with the Id.

Therefore the  pleasure has nothing to do with sharing.

The other profanity is that iam just not impressed in any way by cars and the apparent kudos they bestow. I find it infantile and absurd that some obscenely overpriced machine apparently symbolises some aspect of your character. It bores me to tears and I just feel a real melancholy at the way humans struggle to use commodities to reinforce  their identities.

Are they so fragile? so lacking in any real meaning in their lives?

I know that sounds condescending but I really do mean it.

It horrifies me the way the world is slowly becoming tarmacked and colonised with cars. All this four wheeled poisonous ugly junk cluttering up the streets, which now seemingly belong to the automobile and not the human. And we seem to blindly accept that it is just 'the way it is'

On the radio today I hear annoyed presenters talking about 'bolshy' pedestrians trying to 'front it out'with cars and being vilified for their 'reckless behaviour'..

Isnt this a horrible perverse warping of the truth..? human beings own the streets not cars and the andromobiles that drive them. So excuse me if we bipeds seem belligerent but yes..you will have to slow down when Im crossing the road because its my ground and my space and no im not going to run across the road because you are in a big (usually ugly and tacky) car..

I seriously think motorists, not all, but many, develop a nasty insular arrogance that frankly makes me sick. When people start talking about cars as if they are extensions of themselves, in phallic term s or otherwise, I switch off, my eyes glaze over, I start looking for the door. or someone who has something to actually say..

Being a car owner, for me is acceptable, but being a car lover is a signifier that you and I are from different tribes. Perhaps different worlds.

And the wold I live in is seriously under growing ecological, social and psychological threat from the people who just have to own three cars and drive them to the local shops and back.

I know that some people need to have a car. But for most it is a choice, a choice that has not really been examined, and the social and ecological ramifications not thought through.

We are constantly bombared with the image of The Car. It is almost inescapable. It colonises our consciousness. And it seems in the developing countries the same advertising indoctrination has begun in earnest.

Motorists, I hope we can find common ground. I know cars are not going to go away, not whilst there is enormous money to be made out of them and the petrol they consume, and the people that buy them.

I do hope we can talk. Hopefully about the world beyond your wing mirror.

I am hopeful that you have not all been brain washed.