Thursday, October 25, 2007

Family. Everyone has it. But no one has any real say in the matter, leastways not on the surface of things, and it’s this push-and-pull between responsibility and lack of choice that’s so compelling. Oh, sure, you may have picked your spouse, assuming neither one of you arrived on the doorstep with fifty heads of cattle, but there really ends the extent of your druthers. The art lies in how you play the hand you’re dealt to completion, good and bad and dysfunctional, because the house has you. We’re talking, like, Amityville House of Horrors Has You.

The high point of my long weekend was realizing the amount of gas conserved by having your tires properly inflated, then locking into cruise control. The D.T.E. meter jumped up by more than 70 miles. Serious savings, I know. Now, I can already hear your dire warnings about how cars optimally run at 60 mph and other such balderdash, which is purely preposterous. My baby sings at 85.

I think automotive integrity is one way to describe the feeling. It just seems right, miles-per-gallon maxed out, gliding effortlessly at fantastic velocities, where there’s this sense of honoring motion and the road itself, and something like traffic, or even a rest stop, would ruin this kind of internal consistency. And have you ever tried changing lanes without touching any reflectors? I don’t care what you thought you knew about biology–this is fine motor control.