Dear Car Man...

  (STRONG CAR WEAK MAN)

  Dear Car Man, I woke up today shortly after 6 AM (1). This gave me time to make and have a toasted wheat tortilla with peanut butter and raspberries for breakfast, make some coffee, do some stretching and still get out onto the front porch in time for your raucous(2) daily departure to work. Of the 180° of horizon(3) the sun will traverse today, it had already completed about 35%. It shone directly in my face from somewhere over Lake Michigan. A massive potted plant with proliferating purple leaves sat in front of me on the porch ledge, but it only partially blocked the orb we used to believe was pulled by a great chariot daily across the sky. Fortunately, the New York Review of Books is an extremely tall periodical, and I could read the review of a novel about a young woman who falls in with the Andy Warhol factory crowd in late 1960s New York as I drank my coffee. I lit a stick of incense. In the realm of the auditory, you and your deeply unhappy wife dominate. Your chariot (wh...

 

Dear Car Man, Today was un día tremendo,  in both meanings of the Spanish word- awful & awesome. I worked at McCormick Place, add the AUA annual convention. The American Urological Association. I spoke Portuguese. I met a woman from Turkey who lives in Utah. She told Kiko & me that she goes skiing two to three times a week and that Salt Lake City is not ruled by Mormon mores. Coming back from the convention to isolating Berwyn last night, the Romanian cab driver and I laughed for the entire 30-minute ride about how terrible you are. Really. The clang torture you have pursued against your neighbors for the last two years is so extreme that it reads as grotesque. Did you know that when Franz Kafka read his stories to Max Brod and his friends at the cafés of Prague, they would laugh so hard that tears would be streaming down their faces? Cruelty-sadism-tragedy-absurdity-the grotesque-hilarity. Some  actions are so odious that they follow such a line. Such are yours...

Dear Car Man, I recall nature documentaries in which early life forms project themselves across ancient oceans. A cluster of tentacles within a cone-shaped shell is approached by a predator and retracts inward, in a gesture of self-protection. I feel my body contract in tension when I wake up at five in the morning, as it braces for the metallic orchestra of death you unleash daily at dawn. I lay down on the mattress and my body tenses for impact - independent of my conscious will. I am like the sea mollusk, gathering inward in anticipation of the attack. When I used to be asleep at 7 AM, your Mustang hellfire invaded my audio sensory system, travelled down my spinal column and tensed me into a groggy awakening. This has trained my body to awake and to retract in anticipation of the assault. We live in a time of hatreds, and yet these are vague hatreds based on nothing substantial, on gaseous ideas. The frothing hatred we see beneath the dumb red hats are the fruits of manipulation...

  Dear Car Man, I put in earbuds to block the metallic clang show this morning and played Soundgarden, " Burden in My Hand " at considerable volume. It was the first time I didn't hear the clang show four weeks, maybe months.*  In the video, the members of Soundgarden walk among rising and falling dunes in some western desert. They encounter fences overcome by sand. They seem to be adjacent to the remains of some military installation. Chris sings: Follow me into the desert As thirsty as you are Crack a smile and cut your mouth And drown in alcohol 'Cause down below the truth is lying Beneath the river bed So quench yourself and drink the water That flows below her head *** * (Alas, no easy fixes: It irritated my left inner ear, which has some internal scarring after too much loud headphone music in my past).