from memory on 6/28/2022
“Reading your site, your books, it is painfully obvious that if you just drove, if you had had a car, you would have avoided most of the violence you write about. Is that why you chose not to drive, because it would have reduced your material for writing almost to nothing?”
-Chris, at The Esoteric Cafe
…
I was drinking wine when I answered and will hopefully give a better account of myself a week later in writing.
When I was a boy, walking was hell, the terror storm I lurched through as I was hunted and beaten by bullies.
When I became a psychopath who wished mostly to die a violent death, walking became freedom road.
I have always hated social controls, and when I saw how much social control was built into owning and buying a car, I avoided it as a teen. Given the choice to live on my own or stay with a parent so I could afford a car, I chose to live on my own, which meant in an urban area where I could walk anywhere.
I did not use mass transit until 1992, after 11 years in Baltimore. I was a walker and enjoyed that freedom, that hardly ever brought me in contact with the shitty people as they all drove—until the Kangs moved in, then walking became a bigger issue.
I bought a blue Ford Escort for my wife in 1982, then a GMC Jimmy in 1993, then a Buick, then that and my oldest son’s car, which I had cosigned for, got repoed when I got hurt at work. I would eventually give Miss Ezz a down payment for her Red Charger.
Now, back in 1982, I lived 2 miles from work, an easy 20 minute walk. This walk helped me decompress from work and not bring the problems home. It also gave me time away from the Wife, who was a pain in the ass. When Kangs started moving in and white men started trying to run me over with their cars because I was a pedestrian and therefore a race traitor, we looked into me driving.
Through the 1980s, I made between 15-20k a year, most of which went to mortgage and car payment. We often had a $20-$40 weekly food budget for three in the mid 1980s. Her insurance, as a woman in her 30s, was $600 annually. She drove once a week to buy groceries and once a year to visit her mother, logging 2,000 miles a year. I replaced the exhaust system thrice. To add me to her insurance, as a man in his late teens and twenties, who was a new driver, would have cost $2,000 to $3,000 per year!
In 1993, when working 6 jobs and spending 2-4 hours a day on busses and foot, we decided that driving made sense, that insurance was much lower for me in my 30s, and that I was making decent money. So, the Wife taught me how to drive on the J.C, Penny’s parking lot at Eastpoint Mall, right by the power lines on Merit Boulevard. We did this after she picked me up from the last job of the day, at 5 PM in Dundalk. Once home, I would play with our youngest boy, have dinner, nap from 8 to 8:45, and head out to work from Northeast Baltimore. The driving practice was in the powder blue escort, now ten years old, and every time I shifted into 2nd gear, I fell fast asleep.
I had been sleeping on busses for two years now, and in her car on the way home from long days.
She looks at me, with the boy in the car seat saying “Wake up, Daddy,” and said, “Yeah, you’ll be dead in a weak. I’ll pick you up on payday and late days, but I need a better vehicle, an SUV…”
Ten years later, after that woman kicked me out, I was making good money as a store manager and walking or bussing an hour and a half to work from the County/City DMZ down to Overlea in the city. I thought driving would be a good idea.
I got myself a second learner’s permit and Ajay taught me how to drive at North Plaza Shopping Center on Joppa Road. She thought I did fine, although I drove “like grandpa.”
The problem was, after 15 minutes I was exhausted. This is similar to how using Word, or Google email or a smart phone wipes me out mentally in an instant, is that I have a hard time interfacing with machines. The more control or autonomy the machine has the worse it is. I was very good with walk behind forklifts and tow motors, and bailers too. I was better with a manual jack than anyone I worked with.
How much of this is simple fear of machinery, I do not know. But it is there. Every time I got into a car as a child I was terrified. If my father was driving, the terror was reduced to a state of constant dread.
I did drive a drunk woman back from Ocean City, Maryland in September 2009, including a midnight trip across the Bay Bridge. Fortunately there was no traffic. I only drove off the road three times, all on highway loops.
I tried riding a motorcycle when I was 13 and ran off the trail and into a tree.
I often play a game with myself, while seated next to the driver, I make turns in my mind. Especially at night I consistently choose to steer right when I should steer left as the driver did. I generally wreck the car in my mind every 30 miles during the day and every mile at night.
I think I was safer with the hoodrats in Baltimore than I would be driving a country road at night.
I was born with a terror of cars, which had one cosmic oatmeal cookie suggest I was a reincarnated car wreck fatality.
I do think that being convinced that I was going to die hoorible and be suspended helplessly in twisted wreckage as I burned alive most times I got into a car as a child, and every time I drove with one of my friends when we were teenagers, helped me with facing the Kangly foes of Baltimore, when I was sure, on many occasions that I would die that night at subhuman hands while headed across town to toil for my $10.50 an hour.
Overall, I would say that my chief cowardly traits are:
-1. Fear of machines
-2. Fear of social control
-3. Fear of physical helplessness
-4. Fear of insanity
Fears 1 and 2 seem to combine in my hatred for smartphones and touch screen computers.
Fears 3 and 4 seem to combine in my graphomania.
All of these fears seem to combine in my hatred for police, TV, radio, social media and other forms of meat-puppet programming.
