When Stephen King was hit by a car in 1999, he quickly began incorporating crashes into his novels and characters that shared the same injuries he had faced in the incident. Then in 2002, he reportedly said he would stop writing altogether, partly motivated by the aformentioned accident. King continuted writing despite his claim, and has since published several other books. There is something about hitting and colliding. Spinning and brushing with all the different possible things that could have happened. It haunts. So my haint comes in the form of traffic lights and speeding cars; the sound of loud bangs. The thought of bending metal, laying down for bed at night and having a war flashback: your Nam. The impact and spinning, our fascination with spinning. I've slowed down for those highway jams, the mussled and mushed remains of people huddled on the sides of intersections, the long hauls of ribbons that lace our state, and people have now slowed down for me. Americans love crashes and all the glass that dots the asphalt like sprinkles on ice cream.
There is metal that churns under the earth, the metal that we don’t think of coming from and being of the soil and the dirt.
More like Mars and less like the red Alabama, the clay and evergreens.
For a while I thought I was mad. Madmadmad and obsessive. I'm telling everyone. I want to talk about it to everyone.
All the post-trauma and drama seemed like:
“After having … been constantly bombarded by road-safety propaganda, it was almost a relief to find myself in a real accident.”
The week before my collision I attened road safety school, and while I spun and the air bags came out, I thought to myself:
"77% of all car accidents are driver error and happen within 15 miles of the home."
They always talk about statistics not meaning anything until they happen to you, and by the time you're checking to see if your legs are broken and prying your way out of a jammed, dented door, that 23% doesn't really matter. They don't even exist anymore.
So with the finding of J.D. Ballad's novel, I realized I wasn't the only one obsessed with my metal bending and my ribs mending.
What does all of this damage bring? and the happy ending?
The reevaulations? The crashes we all have?
What have I found
in all of this?
America?:
OR the crashes Americans take, and the crashes in Ginsberg's "America".
"America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel."
All of this after-shock shook me back to my family and the things around me. The clips of sidewinding automobiles and the clippings in the paper about people that don't believe in the Holocaust anymore.The clips girls wear in their hair as they put back on their grandmother's apron, except with nothing on under this time around. Brought back to understanding that my generation is the most individual, but without an identity. Apathetic and confused, used to things being handed to them, and looking at college as expectation not privledge. Where is my America, and the one my mother loved when she woke up one morning to hear that Bobby Kennedy had been shot and she criedcriedcried scared for the things she loved? Where's my shot, and where is my indentification if not between the barracks of silent wars?
Stephen I wish I was with you buddy, because not writing for the next couple of years sure sounds nice and easy. We could just ride the tram together and never put our hands on the fire of ignition again. We could walk more and become vegetarians; soy up our lives and live happily ever after. What real American wants that?
Stephen and J.D, this is what I say. Let's find it, and drive the whole way there.
1 comment:
You're so great. You're one of my favorite things I've found here.
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