May 27, 2023

 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 (which does not pull the sun, but rather the opposite of the sun - a black hole or perhaps the Black Hole Sun posited by the late Chris Cornell), your late night large screen TV, your grinding domestic spats and, of course, the way you and your wife have wailed vulgarities when given a warning or a ticket by the cops, all achieve volumes with which I cannot compete and win(4). But I can assert my presence in the realm of the olfactory.

I heard you exit the house from roughly eight feet away from where I sat and screwed in more tightly my foam earplugs. The woman in the novel about The Factory dissociates from the city and from her fractured past by riding the escalators in the department stores of Manhattan. She sees herself reflected, alternately dully and dazzlingly, in the tinfoil and silver paint covering the walls of Warhol's Lower East Side space. Can you believe it? After two years of hearing your metallic matinal routine, I was still shocked by the Thor-as-speed-freak hammer bang of your exhaust system as the gears engaged this morning! Chrome confusion. All the penumbral dreams of Henry Ford - the dull death of the factory assembly line, Fordlandia rising as a Wagnerian specter from the Amazon green, letters fountain-penned to pale, brooding men in Middle Europe in the 1930s - coalesce in the reverse Big Bang of your Mustang.

***

1) I am reminded of the Lenny Bruce routine wherein some idiot calls him in his hotel room at 10 AM. The guy asks Lenny if he's awake and Lenny says, "Yeah, I always get up 12 hours before I go to work." My body clock wakes me in advance of your daily dumb-dumb Mustang blow up.

2) Interesting sidenote. I use the MacBook Air dictation app to write on this thing because my arms are shredded from repetitive stress injury. Turns out the AI speech recognition is heavily slanted to American corporate speak. Among other things, this means that of roughly every 30 words I dictate, one of them is rendered as a capitalized corporate brand rather than the intended word. In this case, my attempt to write the word “raucous” came out as something called Roccus. I've never heard of the brand, but I’m sure it is a very fine product.

3) Horizon, first rendered as "Verizon" and then something called "Rison" by the speech app.

4) Henry Kissinger just turned 100 years old. Shambolic tub o' shit Donald Trump is full of energy and ambition at age 76. Never let it be said that the miserable and the cruel do persist in what they do. You and your mean-spirited wife are object lessons in how wickedness can sustain a person. I am quite convinced that you could out-miserable me with a little effort.