A small town caused me to hate cars. Grand Theft Auto helped me control them.
Is it fair to hate driving because I hate cars?
This is a portion of an essay. The rest hasn’t been written yet. I stole this idea of “essay building blocks” from
. What lies below is a sandbox of sorts to tease out what could become something bigger, more coherent, and more satisfying.So, what will this particular building block become? Probably an essay about how Grand Theft Auto saved my life.
So first, let me set up my aversion to real-life driving.
I don't like to drive.
Wait, let me shift into reverse and back up a bit: I don't even like cars. Cars have, for my entire life, been a cancer, always present, but visible only under a bisected specimen labeled, “056: Rural America” which sits uncomfortably among a collection of social strata cores collected for nefarious pigeon-holing purposes. Each jar contains a culture and hidden within each culture an example of its infected worst. The bisected “437: Beachfront Community” core reveals a pustule of ever-oozing pus bait for insurance scammers eager to pounce on immigrating retirees. The bobbing-in-its-own-moonshine-based-formaldehyde “612: Mountain Town” core reveals citizens wary of outsiders but paradoxically eager for new murder victims. The “885: Urban Living” core reveals a festering, and too-generalized-to-be-taken-seriously, unvalidated pity for all other cores.
Yeah, I’m the lab tech in this stretched metaphor, which means, yes, I’m doing the pigeon-holing here. These are my own suspect observations of the various culture cores, but for one of the specimens, the pigeon-holing comes by way of my own embedded research. During my childhood, cars plagued my "056: Rural America" hometown. Given my aversion (even then, as a young Caleb) to my rural environment, cars, therefore, became both a sign and a symptom of rot.
I was born on an even smaller than “056: Rural America” town, a “302: Island Military Town” called Adak in, let’s say, an igloo. The Adak island sits at the tail of the Alaskan archipelago not quite equidistant between Russia and Canada. In a tug-of-war contest, Russia would be winning but only slightly. And the prize: a utilitarian military town packed full of slipshod homes, slipshod families, and slipshod sandwiches. Probably, anyway. The truth is, before I could develop memories that were permanent enough to allow me the title of Annoying Guy Talking About his Exotic Birthplace in a conversation, I was whisked away to the mainland where, after a brief stint in Maryland, I spent the majority of my childhood in Kansas in a small “056: Rural America” town called Osage.
The town is easy to find. Start in the Kansas City metro area, where I live now, and drive 1 ½ hours south on the I-35 artery, before fading into country road veins that dump into backroad capillaries until eventually you realize you must have blinked because you passed the pre-stroke blood clot that is Osage. So, do a three-point turn right there on the highway—don’t worry, nobody else is driving on this road—and doubleback until you see a sign pointing to Osage City. You’ve arrived!
That’s right! According to the sign, this isn’t a town. It’s a thriving metropolitan CITY. Population: Don’t worry about it.
“That sure sounds like you’re covering the fact that this city is actually a town,” you say.
I agree. But I follow in the obfuscating footsteps of Osage City’s founder—Tim Osage we’ll call him—whose exploration crew of late 19th-century dirt road sherpas were certainly confused as well.
“Osage...City, sir? I think you mean Osage Town,” uttered one particularly brash crewmember.
“Or Osage Ville,” yelled the annoying crew member who doesn’t have ideas of his own, but instead he hijacks other ideas. And even worse, this bastard thinks that his lateral ideas are better ideas. What an asshole.
“You’re both thinking too narrowly,” Tim Osage responded. “One day this will all be a bustling metropolis, full of people and about 8.4 million working cars!”
“How, sir? We’re over an hour drive from the nearest actual city. And ‘one hour’ is a time measured using future gasoline car technology. In today’s probably horse drawn carriage time, that’s like weeks away!...and also, why did you stress ‘working’ cars so much? Are non-working cars a problem in future Osage ‘a Real City’ City?”
Unfortunately, Tim Osage couldn’t respond. His new “Welcome to Osage City” sign couldn’t bear the weight of the additional C-I-T-Y and so collapsed upon Tim Osage, killing him instantly.
But as a former long-time resident of Osage City, I can confirm that yes, non-working cars are a problem in future Osage ‘a Real City’ City.
My memories, like all of our most vivid memories, are informed by their most potent aspects. For me, for some reason, that aspect is cars. Cars everywhere. Osage was a town where exhausted cars decorated lawns like skeletons ripped of their skin by atomic blasts, a town where ass cracks worshiped before propped car hoods. In my Osage, birds had learned to court the sound of ratcheting socket wrenches.
Almost equally as potent to cars in my galvanized memories were the citizens themselves and their relaxed approach to any alignment beyond cars, sports, and heterosexuality. Now, I fully admit that my own personal disdain for bigotry certainly accounts for how much I remember—or falsely remember—the degree of sexist and racist uninhibition. To my memories, the entire queer spectrum was dismissed with hostility, and non-whites were openly treated as second-class citizens. For Halloween one year, I dressed up as a zombie ninja (ie, a ninja, but you know, also a zombie). My step-father’s mother asked, without hesitation, “Are you a jigaboo” or something?” While I knew the term jigaboo was awful, even more awful was that nobody there—a crowd that contained at least four adults—didn’t dare to make sure I know how awful the term was. They let the derogation survive and gave it permission to thrive.
Also, not nearly as important a point, but what about a zombie ninja screams “Black person?” Anway…
Everything else about my childhood in Osage City was amazing. I had friends. I had a loving family. But the intersection of cars-to-close-minded-bigots was too narrow to ignore. And rather than work ‘across party lines’ to dissociate 4x4 pickup trucks and Pontiac Firebirds from their drivers, I gave into the human brain’s penchant for shortcuts. Cars = bigots = small town = bad.
My brain-laziness surely wasn’t informed only by the lifted car hoods and exposed ass cracks lining my everywhere periphery, but also by my mother’s much more proximate second husband (and aforementioned step-father) whom I hated with atypical fervor. I generally get along with everyone. But not this guy, I’ll call him Barney. And Barney loved cars. Barney = cars = bigots = small town = bad.
Barney and my mom married when I was in high school, in a ceremony that my older sister refused to participate in due to her hatred for Barney. I was too young to think I had such a say in my role, but even if I thought of protesting the same way, I wanted to walk my mother down the aisle. I participated for her and only for her.
Perhaps Barney reinforced the Venn diagram of bigot and car owner more than any other part of my childhood. He didn’t just love cars; he loved cars when he shouldn’t have. After he and my mother divorced (just a few years after they married) I never saw him again. But, I did hear his name once, called out by a judge, in court. We were scheduled for the same date, different offenses. Me: a Minor in Consumption (not-yet-21-Caleb didn’t quite know how to party responsibly). He: probably drunk driving. He loved beer as much as he loved cars, and he loved them both often simultaneously. After emptying a Budweiser, he’d discarded the cans into his truck bed through the rear window. Every turn shifted the cans along the metal truck bed rails like rice grains cackling through a rain stick.
He was a no-show for that court date. I don’t know what the legal repercussions were, if any. Years later, I’d learn that he died of liver issues. Yep.
Once, while mowing the large, country lawn surrounding the house our fragile family exist in for a few years, I ran over one of his infant pine trees. I blamed our new puppy, claiming that I was trying to pull him from in front of the lawn mower as I was driving it, and uh oh, I accidentally destroyed the tree. Honestly, though, I just wanted to destroy something he cared about.
But this isn’t about how fake-heroic I can be. This is about how much I hate driving. My aversion to cars seeded an aversion to driving in a way that I accept isn't entirely rational. So hard was my distaste for car culture that I refused to accept the obvious benefits. I can hate Hitler but still enjoy highways. I can condemn the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but still think bone marrow transplants are pretty cool. Before Ted Bundy murdered a bunch of people, he worked as a suicide hotline operator. I could high-five him for that (though if given that chance, I'd still check my perimeter to ensure no bystanders are watching who might get the wrong idea. I know I wouldn't be very receptive to my own stammering. “No…he, like, helped people, I swear, look it up, he's bad, but that high-five was for the suicide stuff…wait, why are you calling the police!?").
So, I’ve never really allowed myself to enjoy driving because I’ve for so long built up a dislike of the car. This isn’t fair to the act of driving. It’s not fair to the people I coerce into doing all the driving during road trips.
But the one kind of driving I loved: reckless driving in Grand Theft Auto.
I imagine that the next “essay building block” might dig into my time with Grand Theft Auto. By pairing the games fake driving (that at the time felt like accurate driving physics) with a real-life highway-speed car accident that forced me to rely on what I learned by playing Grand Theft Auto…really…I’ll build an essay that has fun with the disparity between my distaste for car culture and my reliance upon it.
At first I was calling it Post Ideas as an excuse to put up a huge variety of content, but now you got me thinking of making posts that show notes and bullet points and such--like a behind-the-scenes view on the writer's process...