Race Flash Crash Burn
4/13/2020 — Carlisle, Massachusetts
4/13/2020 — Carlisle, Massachusetts
Driving fast in the fog with no headlights. Your leg starts to hurt from pushing the pedal so hard. The radio’s broken. You’re low on gas.
This is mid-April. We’re racing like hell, but for how long? When do we hit empty and sputter to the side of the road, dead in our tracks? Will we make it? And to where? The only news is loud internet static on busted speakers that says we’re never going back to normal, we’re all going back to normal, it will be a year until we go back to normal. Millions will die, tens of thousands will die. It’s a devastatingly horrific amount, it’s a normal horrific amount. We tell ourselves, “I can’t keep doing this. But I have no choice so I’ll keep going. At least a little while longer.”
You get tired and ask, “Until when?”
When?
When.
When.
The word loses meaning and becomes the metronome tocking of the road under your tires.
Then you remember it doesn’t matter what you think about when or how many or to whom. This is way bigger than you. This is bigger than comprehension. Experts say things that change and revert and eddy and flex and crack until you realize they aren’t experts, they are voices affixed to website and television megaphones. There are no experts. There’s just loud static. You forget you realized this miles ago. Your memory is shot by now. Turn off your brain already.
You relax off the accelerator to stretch your leg a bit but the cruise control you never set lurches the car forward. Whoa! You haven’t been driving all along! The racing Corona car never decelerates. Speed rips through the hours and days and weeks. Wake up, eat, work, sleep. Wake up, eat, watch, sleep. Wake up, eat, text, sleep. See a person. Don’t see a person. March is history. Passover flies by. Easter’s in the rearview. What’s next? No idea but it’ll be gone soon. If we make it.
Check the sun visor mirror real quick. Who’s the you riding in the Corona car? It’s not you now, it’s you then. We’re all teenagers again. You listened to Jay-Z or Sonic Youth or The Animals or Frank Sinatra or Cab Calloway; to whomever ensorceled your adolescent soul by singing directly to you in a voice that knew you better than you knew yourself. When this incantation comes back to you, it reminds you of the most reckless and most boring time of your life.
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know, what do you want to do?”
It reminds you of racing cars, smoking cigarettes, sitting around parking lots and talking more about the girls or boys you desired than to them. It was pathetic and critical. When the right song comes on you can see the cassette tapes or dance steps or records or venues or CDs and you feel those same feelings and you’re like, “yes, exactly.”
You had no clue. You had no frame of reference. No long view on life. You just raced forward not knowing if you were heading off a cliff or entering paradise. That’s the blind acceleration of youth. This is now, April 2020, but it reminds me of then. For me the soundtrack is Sonic Youth’s Goo tour in 1991 at the Boston Orpheum. I went by myself and looked in awe at the goth girls in full make up and Thurston Moore thrusting against a guitar, banging into a speaker to get the loud static feedback that tells you more than any news story or opinion piece.
This is going to end. It won’t end well. It will be beautiful.
Roll down the window, feel the wind, scream the lyrics, let go of the wheel, push your right foot down and close your eyes.