My Car

If I haven’t yet bragged about it enough, I was recently made the owner of a brand-new 2013 Kia Optima. There were only 7 miles put on it that weren’t my fault, and I am already feeling like this is going to be a long-lasting partnership between man and machine. The quintessential new car smell hasn’t even worn off yet, and I’ve already found some peculiarities. Nothing wrong with it, just things I’ve found to be a little… odd.

The first being that I get a violent shock every time I exit the vehicle. Not that annoying little snap of static you sometimes get when you touch a doorknob in Winter, but a loud, cracking bolt that I feel through my entire hand. Even when I attempt to discharge on the plastic trim at the edge of the door, it issues the kind of electric crackling that normally signals to people “Hey, stay the hell out of there. Something dangerous going on.” So far, it seems that I am the only person who has experienced this, and I’m not entirely sure what to make of it. Obviously it’s not an electrical malfunction. Am I cursed? Do I possess an electrical affinity? Are parts of the car made from the scraps at the forge after the creation of Mjölnir, and it demands to be rammed into an ice giant?

Part of the deal was that satellite radio comes free for the first 90 days of ownership. Local radio stations don’t seem to come in all that clearly around here due to the hills and shadow beasts interfering. I took the time to scan through a couple thousand channels, and I have settled on some that I find to be most pleasing, but again, shadow beasts. Comedy Central has its own channel, which comes in handy when I’ve heard the same goddamn songs too many times, but there is a slight hissing sound that tends to carry on in the background. I like to imagine that, despite the fact that it’s a digital radio station, the original audio provided is through an old gramophone sitting with a microphone leaning into the horn.

I have already managed to close the door with a bee trapped inside. The offender had nearly flown into my arm, and I retracted my hand to let it pass on by, but the door was already shutting. The bee took a little break on the door handle, and the established bad reputation of yellow jackets damned us both. It was a good ten seconds of furious buzzing and swearing before I could get to the door handle and ease the tension. Bottom line: bees need to calm their shit down. This didn’t need to happen.

I had a second non-human passenger in the form of the tiniest spider I have ever seen. I was waiting at the drive-thru when I noticed a barely perceptible arachnid trying his damnedest to get across the hairy expanse of my arm. I watched for a minute or two as he fumbled over one hair, fell onto his back, and then righted himself to attempt to scale another with no goal or end in sight. Before I rolled up to the window, I took a moment to say goodbye, then blew him out the window to the ground below.

I’m sure the spider was fine, but think about the whole experience from its perspective. Pretend for a moment that you are alone in the thick of the jungle. Maybe it’s during an earthquake, because the world itself seems to be tilting and shifting below you as you climb from one oddly-angled, leafless tree to another. You think you’ve finally got your bearing on this weird world, when suddenly you sense a rapid change in altitude, and a roaring, hurricane-force wind blows you right out of the trees. You somehow manage to survive a fall that is easily hundreds of times your height, because wind resistance and your exoskeleton favor you in situations just like this. Before you can even drink in that exhilarating “I survived unscathed” feeling that so often leads people right to Jesus, the space you just inhabited, a mass the size of some tremendous mountain range, begins to move. Some foul wind blows, and it lurches forward faster than you could ever imagine something that size moving. It stops momentarily around a day’s travel away, then it speeds away again. Before you can blink twice, something the size of the Alps has ejected you and sped out of sight. No human language has a word to accurately express your bewilderment.

These are the things I think about.