Middle of the Road

Driving While Human

I cannot relish the thought of being lost to time. We all are, of course, but some of us make a mark that lasts: a year, a decade, or a few decades. Some humans even influence others for centuries to come. Isn’t that wild?

I like wild.

Mediocrity isn’t my forte, even when I give it my best shot.

Living a normal life, in a normal place has always irked me. Working a normal job… like, what am I? Some kind of human? Nah. I have always wanted to make an impact. Not like a meteor, but something more like a meteor shower. You wait for it and watch in awe as it sprinkles its barely-comprehensible physical existence upon your retinas every few months or years.

I feel akin to an otherworldly storm.

A human, it seems

But don’t get me wrong; I’m lucid. I’m a human woman who does chores and cooks food and sweeps and takes showers and buys organic eggs and drops packages off at the post office. I actually feel a lot more normal now, forty years in, than I ever did in my youth. The irony, of course, is that I tried really bloody hard to be normal in my younger days. I was constantly reigning in my weirder tendencies and adhering strictly to social norms even as I felt like I was supposed to be living in an inexplicably lush, mossy-green geode-laden cave on another planet.

I didn’t learn to drive until my 30’s, and didn’t acquire my driver’s license until I turned 40. Now, instead of being a perpetual pedestrian, I roll around in a giant cart on wheels, simultaneously observing and avoiding my surroundings out of pure necessity. I notice things that I don’t imagine a person who learned to drive 25 years younger than I did might.

Cars are unnatural. As bizarre as the Wi-Fi connection through which you are reading this text right now. Walking is normal. Walking is undeniably old guard human shit. Cars that tell you everything you need to know about your commute, while aggressively reminding you to put on your seatbelt and blowing hot or cold air in your face (dealer’s choice) are weird. Make-a-big-fucking-mark weird. Change-the-course-of-human-history weird.

Sometimes, I feel I might be that strange. That…significant.

But then, I notice how sore my back is and how little work I am willing to put into punching a crater into human consciousness when I could just cook another meal, or write another song.

When my husband (who, for the last five years, has supported us financially by teaching other people to drive) taught me to drive, he had plenty of helpful catch-phrases to share. “If you don’t know, don’t go,” is a particularly prescient one that can be applied to so many aspects of life it deserves its own treatise. But it was during his explanation of how to stay in your lane when you first get out on the street that he offered up this gem:

“You want to feel like you’re sitting in the middle of the road.”

(He meant the middle of the lane - maybe he used that word - but this is how I heard it.)

Imagine that you’re on a tiny dirt road, headed into the woods or over to a lake, or down a one-way alley. From the driver’s seat, it really does look like you’re cruising down the middle of the road. But from the passenger seat or in the back, your perspective shifts, and you’re no longer in the middle of the road.

You’re closer to the ditch.

The lifetime pedestrian in me knows what it feels like to travel down the shoulder, getting my feet wet in ravines and climbing over culverts. The pedestrian in me knows what it feels like to be both a passenger and a navigator traversing my own life. Sacks of sodden groceries like bricks weighing down the straps on my clavicle bones. Bags of delicate edibles tumbling indelicately off of the seat and onto the floor at stop signs.

Slow damage. Quick destruction.

It’s faster in the middle of the road. Easier. Arguably safer. But I witness - and create - a lot less slow-cooked, organic magic when I’m gliding down the centre of life. Fewer smells, fewer spells. More armour and fewer obstacles. Hurry-up-and-get-there, and then what?

Suddenly, I am still.

Pseudo-jet lagged by dues paid in kilometres instead of in beats per minute.

Driving strikes me as yet another way in which one can easily become lost to time, trees awhirl, subtly normalizing transhumanism in would-be autonomous cars. Voice-recording song and essay ideas whilst hurtling around in a speeding cart. Flying on land.

What on Earth is weirder than that?