I'm excited about learning how to drive. Pity it hasn't begun yet. I guess everybody of a certain age, having got back from holiday, has the same idea I do and the driving schools are all booked up. Oh well. This is Belgium and I mustn't expect things to be easy. I must be patient, and remember it's not like I have anywhere to go. I live in the centre of a high speed train system that can direct me towards anywhere in this weird and diverse continent; in a couple of weeks I'm taking a direct train to Marseille - it'll take about 5 hours - driving would take twice that, at best. I must remember that getting the license is not in aid of my life here, but of my life when I move to a country with remarkably bad infrastructure, which is unlikely to happen for a couple of years yet.
Most of the phenomena in my life can be at least partly explained by laziness, and my failure to get a driver's license to date is no exception. But another part of the explanation is that I think cars are absolutely fucking retarded. Over the last 12 years of cycling, how many grim-faced traffic jams have I breezed past? Over the past 30 years of being a passenger, how many times have I seen the driver cuss and fret and look desperately around like a turtle trying to decide whether or not to panic, searching desperately for a parking spot? How many times have I cursed the filthiness of the air in Canadian, Belgian, French and Italian cities - especially the Italian cities, where the pollution is visibly chewing its way through the cultural patrimony? How many of my contemporaries finished university in my mercifully debt-free position, and then proceeded to run debt up on a lease or the other expenses - insurance, parking, and all that motherfucking gas - that I've never had to think about?
My 'cars are bad' notion owes a lot to their contribution to overall pollution, both in tree-hugging terms and in human health terms. But it also owes a lot to the fact that, out of all the people in my life I can think of who were very taken before their three score and ten, one bought it from suicide, two bought it from cancer and a dozen bought it in car accidents. In blunt statistical terms that means I should hate cars 6 times as much as I hate cancer, and as for suicide, well . . .
So it's not just the gas-guzzling and the pollution that makes me think cars are stupid. I don't think they're simply a technology that can be improved by changing the power source to something 'cleaner', and I don't know that batteries are all that much 'cleaner' anyways; they have all their own attendant disposal problems and you know everyone except the Dutch, Germans, Scandinavians, alternate South American and Spanish governments, and the Japanese is going to fuck that up. I just think they're a really stupid way to get from point A to point B. Inconvenient, dirty, dangerous, farting, annoying, frustrating, expensive things, that people carjack no less. And I think it's the goddamn height of the problem with modern society that the governments we've chosen have been so lazy, so pandering to corporate or industrial interests, as to allow urban and national planning that makes something so inconvenient, dirty, dangerous, farting, annoying, frustrating, and expensive the centrepiece of how we all get around. We suck. Except the Dutch.
That having been written, I am quite excited about learning how to drive. Though I think cars are absolutely fucking retarded as a cornerstone of the transportation system, and though I think future generations, if they exist, will look as askance at our dependence on cars as we look askance on the Roman's dependence on lead piping for their water systems in rich neighborhoods - stupid fucking Romans - it looks like it will be jolly fun to drive one. Cars shouldn't be for getting us around, they should be for fun. For Nascar and racing and amusing television programmes like Top Gear and Magnum PI and The Dukes of Hazzard and the one where the car talks to David Hasselhoff. For Prince songs, and Beach Boys songs, and chases in Bond movies, and to show off at masturbatory shows, like purebred dogs.
Or, indeed, like ducks dressed as geishas. Give a listen to the mp3, it's the cutest thing in the world. Especially the part about how going to Hong Kong will be such a big change. I wish Brian Harrington was my uncle. The only thing I've seen this week that even rivals that story for cuteness is the obituary of Jack Weil in this week's Economist, the 107-year-old who invented cowboy chic.
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