3.28.2025 - Weekly Digest
Hiya all.
These are about automobiles. Well, they start that way anyway.
Check out the stuff at the bottom to learn more about this week's guest artist.
3.24.2025
Ann Arbor. Snowstorm. I leave the car, an old sedan like my grandma’s from the ‘80s, in a parking lot. At the house of one of my mom's friends, a songwriter who nailed it with a hit they use at sporting events. He wants to hear this song I wrote. I play it for him, screwing up the order of the verses and a few of the lines. I sense his impatience or disinterest and speed it up. Then I’m sitting at an awkward angle to him and remember the car. ‘You’ve seen those streets,' I say, meaning the streets near campus with the cars jammed in along the curb with no daylight between them. ‘Can you imagine parking there?’
*
I want to say a few words about my last car. Maybe my last car ever, who knows. She was a blue 2009 Subaru Forester and I named her Bloob. I don’t know if she had other names before she was mine.
I’m using the third person feminine pronoun here to recall the way old guys talked about cars and boats and rototillers when I was a kid. ‘She don’t wanna make it up the hill.’ Imagine it comes from naval culture; kinda funny they used it in the landlocked part of Michigan where I grew up. Found some other explanations online but they're mostly as sexist as they are useless.
I picked this particular make and model and color because I'd driven a similar car when I lived in Oregon and had a comfortable feeling about it. Also because, in Traverse City, the number of other drivers around having that exact car increased my odds of getting away with crimes.
Bloob had a good run. Her previous owner kept her clean and unrusted and she had 240,000 miles on 'er when I picked 'er up as-is from the local dealership. If it helps, that's roughly the distance to the moon from wherever you are now, dependent upon orbital cycles and such. She needed a lot of work to keep 'er running and she ran, for a good three years, until I was on my way back upstate from Detroit between Christmas and New Year's and the dashboard lit up like a holiday tree.
Got her towed to the dealership back in Ann Arbor and after poking around her insides they determined she couldn't be saved, at least for less than twice what I'd paid for her in the first place. I signed her over for scrap and when I finally got home revised my Jexit plans and booked a plane ticket to Toronto.
I am not one who believes that everything happens for a Reason but I will say when that second blizzard hit just after I got to Montreal and I saw what these folks go through with their cars in these parts I was grateful to have only my boots to worry about.
Bon voyage, Bloob. May the road beneath your treads be not as rough.
3.25.2025
from “Jamestown” (previously published in EPISODES, my old newsletter)
It's the cars. Sedans, sportsters, road hogs, limousines, elephant trucks with no line of sight for pedestrians driven by beards who take out their insecurities on animals and women and children and guys who read books in public, bigger versions of the kids who stepped on and still step on anthills to prove their superiority, ol’ boys whose idea of a good time is spraying bullets out into the world and praying to their pervert gods they hit something living. All-wheel drive, no-wheel drive, whatever. Electrics are just as bad, harder to hear, which makes it easier for them to sneak up on you.
Folks say this used to be a good town for pedestrians. I guess I believe them but they’re also the same people who drive into each other all day, run red lights, stop where there’s no stop sign, watching their grandkids on their phones while they roll over ducklings or crash into the organic grocery store and claim later that ‘the car sped up all of a sudden’. If you're on foot you might as well wear a safety cone for a hat.
Mars says the automobile industry built this state. I tell him well I guess that makes me a bad Michiganese, then, and if that’s the case, then screw this place too, in both peninsulas.
He laughs and takes a crowbar to a steamer trunk. We half expect to find someone inside, a kid preserved like a mummy, maybe, but it’s just a fog of grime and sulfur like in caves. The whole inside of the planet must smell like that. We both gag.
‘What we doing with this one?’ I ask.
He drops the lid and covers his mouth.
‘Dunno yet. That’s for God to decide.’
Seems like a small matter for His Holiness to be involved in but whatever. I don’t know if he believes that stuff or if he's just lazy with his thoughts. Maybe he just says that because it’s Sunday and he's been at the addiction center next door all morning. He keeps most of his notions to himself. He’s curious about people, though. Always asking me what I think of things. Mostly I’m just annoyed in general, which amuses him. The more serious I am about hating something the more hilarious as far as he's concerned. His only real interests are keeping his wife alive and repurposing junk left in the alleys or tossed out when folks get evicted. There’s a lot of good stuff if you look hard enough. That much I’ve learned from him. And I’m getting pretty good with the torch. Not that I plan on using it anywhere. Not like I’m going to own my own place someday like these retirees up here (though "recent events may have had an effect on property values", the radio said).
Back in the present: would be amazing, like, miracle level, if this old van of his still works. Water up to the axles probably won't improve performance. Door feels like it’s going to fall off, but it opens, and hangs there as if stuck on with tape. Key in the ignition where he always left it. Turns over. Shakes like it's got pleurisy or consumption. Only Mars and me know how to use the shift. Needle says tank empty. The needle never worked. No guarantees. Rusty bastard lurches into the slop. Main thing now is where the hell to go.
3.26.2025
‘Why do we live in a car dealership?’
‘We have our pick of vehicles to choose from, to use for different purposes. I prefer sleeping in SUVs but for whatever reason hatchbacks are better for cooking.’
‘The plumbing in the building is turned off.’
‘We’re better off out here. More choices.’
‘Where do we go to the bathroom?’
‘The Teslas are over there.’
*
‘What happened to the salesfolk?’
‘I imagine they all perished.’
‘We should have a service for them.’
‘I’ve been gathering subcompacts for that very purpose.’
‘You’re very thoughtful.’
‘Thank you for noticing. Here, have a Volkswagen.’
‘That’s okay, I already have some. By the way I think we should sleep in separate Jettas. It doesn’t mean we don’t love each other.’
*
‘We should go somewhere.’
‘If you think that’s wise.’
‘How many cars should we bring?’
‘Depends on how far we’re going.’
‘There’s a place I saw in one of the brochures inside. There’s a cliff and a sunset.’
‘Let’s take the one in the photo then.’
‘We’re going to need more than that.’
‘I’ve been experimenting with fitting cars inside other cars. With your help we can get at least four Fiats inside that Subaru.’
‘You make me Toyota strong.'
3.27.2025
Back in a city where you can walk everywhere or hop a bus or creep into the subway if you want it's nice to remember that not every place is a suburb of Detroit.
Not that mobility is a sin or the want of it. The freedom to escape the half acre we were born on is appealing in a lot of ways.
Slapping together thousands of vehicles no one needs, the types what fall apart as soon as we drive them off the lot, and holiday sales and having a dealership's row in every county are also some things some folks are into and I'm not here to shame your kinks.
Michigan could be pristine like those aerial photos of fjords in Norway if you ask me.
Look at these protests. I mean look at 'em. You have this thing designed to solve everything, turns out it's not so great and the guy who claims to have invented it turns around and chops the country to pieces hoping we don't notice. Helluva thing y'know.
And it's none of my business but maybe it's silly to expect a thing on wheels to provide stability. And maybe folk who grow up licking rust don't care to see the difference between a charlatan and a mountebank and to expect them to have the same values as me is downright foolish and maybe they don't think they can afford to care and now we're all stuck in the same pit together and all I know to do is walk until my shoes fall off.
Guest Artist Profile: BK
My friend Brian is a scientist who taught himself to paint. In something like two years he's been through dozens of phases, investigating every artist and learning every technique. It's dangerous, and it delights me.
Find his work here: design_by_bk
https://www.instagram.com/design__by__bk?igsh=cXBpZXpyem9najdh&utm_source=qr
And here's his awesome bio:
