SITTING IN THE CAR.

This is about sitting in the car, at dusk, when the sun is finally done scratching the back of your neck—you didn’t know it could reach in that way, but you feel the characteristic sting of sunburn which you usually work moderately hard to avoid.

You're on a busy interstate: a road carved out for the very purpose of harboring the transport of thousands and probably millions (tens of millions?) of humans every day. There’s a particular feeling that happens when you start to approach civilization—a weird and unplaceable feeling. As you get closer, you start to see more billboards. You don’t register them after awhile. You stop being so fed up with the capitalism of it all, and it just becomes second nature, but in the truest sense of that phrase. If the trees and grass and shrubs on the sides of the road are the first nature, the one that was perverted and subverted and inverted for this interstate to get put down, then the billboards and streetlights and semi trucks are second nature.

claustrophobia

There’s that number two coming back again as a reminder of the problem. There shouldn’t be a second nature. But there is one. And we all get stuck on interstates for hours at a time, made to unknowingly worship these second-nature things. It’s dualism, it’s extractive, it’s dehumanizing, it’s denaturing, it’s evil. In the truest sense of the word.

Pure evil is the feeling I get when I travel on the interstate. It pits me against other humans, all of us reduced to avatars. I only know them by their cars, and the rare bumper sticker that ostensibly "says something" about the driver but is really just another two-dimensional representation that means not nothing, but less than nothing. As in, I’d have preferred not to have seen the bumper sticker at all. I‘d much prefer if the cars were transparent—fully transparent—and we could all see each other in our naked truths: human beings strapped into leather or felt or polyester (?) seats, in a seated position, heads facing forward, hands on the wheel (sometimes hands-off, sometimes one-hand-on, one-hand-off). Feet on the floor. Sunglasses on, until dusk comes around, and we begin to shed them like feathers we don’t need anymore. And when night comes, we pull off into motels or hotels or walmart parking lots or campsites, sometimes molting our cars, sometimes sleeping in them, letting the naked truth come to us in our sleep, returning to the first nature one way or another, even if only in our dreams.

I hate the interstate. I don’t want to get gas anymore. I don’t want to witness any more commerce. Trains carrying massive boxes of who knows what driving perpendicular to the endless stream of car traffic. Trucks hauling chickens to slaughter, horses to ranch, amazon products to a public unsuspecting of the evils that were necessary in making the products possible. their delivery possible. their production possible. the world possible.

Second nature, though. It’s second nature to all of us. You won’t hear any of the other drivers complaining about stuff, because they’ve been told to keep their hands on the wheel at all times, to “just drive, “ to not alter themselves in any way, to submit to the overwhelmingly second nature of things, to look at the billboards, to consider renting their own billboards, to think about which hotel chain they should sleep in tonight, or what fast food chain they should get their dinner from.

We are sated and soothed by the promises of capitalism. They remind us, deep down, of a mother’s breast, but they offer nothing in return for our money but a temporary relaxation of our biological impulses. No love, no nothing. And we keep the wheel turning with every drop of gas we put into our cars, and every millisecond of thought we put into the decisions we make behind the wheel. To cut someone off or not, to brake-check someone else or not, to wrap the car around a speed limit sign or not.

We all implicitly endorse this entire thing by driving alongside each other. It’s parallel play that none of us would have ever signed up for if we knew the upshot.

Would you have signed up for this? Honestly, would you? Looking at metal boxes that you think contain people all day? Not feeling anything of the outside world except the occasional wind through the occasionally opened window, and the bumps communicated to your butt through the giant hunk of metal and plastic and gas that you’re sitting in?

No more second nature. Bring back first nature. Tear it all down. Drop a bomb for every square inch of highway, but put seeds into the bomb so the rewilding process won’t be too traumatic for the first nature. Destroy every institution that needs these roads in order to continue. Destroy the institutions that make the cars, make the billboards, make the hotels, make the genetic code for the chickens that go into the mcnuggets, make the concrete and the paint that we’re driving on. Let the first nature fill in the blanks, and let’s all take a seat for a moment. We’ve done enough for several many lifetimes of species, don’t you think? It could be nice to let the other species talk for a while. A long while.

immovable