Chasing Cars

In which a dying anutomobile and an anodyne pop-rock playlist unsticks me from time while also making me hyper-aware of my place within it.

The samsara is the sense of self. I've had past experiences. I'm aware of the moment. I will have future experiences. Death and Light are everywhere, always, and they begin, end, strive, attend, into and upon the Dream of the Nameless that is the world, burning words within Samsara, perhaps to create a thing of beauty.

-Roger Zelazny

It is the year 2024. I am a 41-year-old husband and father of two sitting in the lounge of an automobile dealership waiting for my new vehicle to be detailed and handed over to me. It is the first time that I have purchased a car entirely in my own name. I answer work emails even though it is a Sunday evening because I didn’t think to bring anything else to keep me occupied. I drink hot chocolate that has been brewed from a disposable pouch in a common-use coffee machine because it’s late enough that I fear lack of sleep from over-caffeination. The post-sale detailing of the car has been rushed so that I can drive it home tonight rather than come back the next afternoon, and so I am here after they have closed. I watch the various salespeople that I have seen milling about walk past me into a break room and then walk back past with personal effects as they leave for the night. Eventually it is just me and Alexander, the man who has sold me the car. He sits at his open-floor desk, the only one within my eyesight, scrolling his phone in boredom. Occasionally he gets up to check on the process of the cleaning. I say “man” even though he is ostensibly a kid. He is almost twenty years my junior, and yet because of the nature of our transaction, and the anxiety that tends to accompany this kind of sale (Can I pretend like I know what I’m talking about? Are they going to try to screw me? Will they figure out my trade-in is in worse shape than I’ve let on before the sale is finalized? What would even happen if they did – would the deal be cancelled? Could I be arrested for fraud?), I find myself inadvertently lending him an authority that suggests the opposite. Riding around with him during our test drive, I talk about the family that I have made; he talks about his girlfriend and the family he was born into in a way that reveals the distance between us. He is incredibly young and yet I realize that I feel, as I often do, like a kid play-acting as an adult.

As I think about this, I begin to take note of the songs playing over the showroom’s speakers. A satellite radio station, I assume, as I realize that the songs are all related by a common theme: namely that they are all from the early-to-mid-2000s, that strange interstitial era in which grunge and alternative rock started to bleed into post-grunge and nu-metal and rock overall tried to figure itself out before all but dying out as a mainstream interest. Like most children of the 90s who crashed against the rocks of early-onset adulthood around this time, like everyone who got to an age during this era at which they started to realize that they were beginning the process of aging out of the culture at large, I look back consciously on this period of music with general scorn bordering on antipathy. And yet, as I concern myself with other matters and let this soundscape roll over me in the background, I find myself responding to it with an emotional intensity that surprises me.

I stumble once again into a realization that I’ve had multiple times – that the songs you don’t think about do a better job of marking time than the ones that you consciously remember and hold close. Like watching a child grow up, the passage of time is hidden in the gradual lengthening of bone or development of facial features, but see a niece that you haven’t encountered in a year or two and you’re jolted into remembrance of the fact that time never for a moment stands still or takes time to rest. I look at Alexander and I think that some of these songs have existed for almost as long as he’s been alive; I realize that I was almost his age when they were released and have lived almost that long all over again in the time since.

And just like that, as I sit alone waiting in this liminal space of polished white tile and leather lounge chairs, I become keenly aware of two individual beings existing simultaneously in the morass of time and space. I am a 41-year-old film professor, a husband and father of two, sitting in the waiting room of a car dealership on a Sunday evening in 2024. I am also a 21-year-old college student, spending a Sunday night home alone with a stack of rented DVDs, so lonely and afraid and standing on the precipice of a future that I cannot see no matter how hard I try. The 41-year-old is here because his car was on its last legs. The 21-year-old has recently bought his first new car (with the help of a co-signer) because the one he has been driving has died. The 41-year-old has new fears, new anxieties tied to his current situation and to a more macro view of the concerns of the world and life on this planet, concerns that extend well beyond the range of his own life because of the fact that he now has children that will outlive him. And yet he is also secure in himself and his place in the world to a degree that the 21-year-old, who is beginning to fear that he has wasted his four years at college and come out on the other end no clearer about how to achieve what he wants to achieve, could never comprehend¹.

That 21-year-old looks at his teachers and sees mature, seasoned professionals who at their best have provided mentorship either conscious or innate. He cannot imagine ever being in that kind of position. The 41-year-old now is. And while he tries his best to be a similarly assured guiding hand to the students now in his charge, he feels some of those same insecurities still bubbling beneath the surface and he wonders if his professors felt the same. He has enough life behind him to know that of course they did. Because while so much changes, so much also does not. Even when you move beyond the person you were, that person is still deep inside you somewhere, coexisting within that same moment. Hearing the same music piped over a set of common-space speakers or warbling through a car radio. The 21-year-old will spend a foolhardy amount of time trying to run from this fact, trying to deny it. The 41-year-old embraces it not so much out of a need or desire to return, but to allay the fears of that younger self through his own existence. This sometimes inverts itself, as the 41-year-old looks at his students and sees a self-assuredness, a degree of purpose that he lacked at that age. Yet he has also had the opportunity to counsel students who have come to him with the exact fears and insecurities that he once faced.

I step outside of myself and, in the space of a singular moment allow myself to experience both realities at once. I even briefly consider a third existence: one in which that younger version of myself never figured it out. I try not to stay there too long, though I think it’s important to not only pay occasional visits to who you were to see how far you’ve come, but also versions of yourself that luckily never came to pass. It provides perspective. Usually this kind of thing would hit me hard in a way that left me feeling mournful of time past, though this time what strikes me is the distance between that younger, sadder version of myself and the version I am today.

I am thankful to be in a place where this kind of moment leaves me in a place of thankfulness and exhilaration rather than in a place of longing and regret. The need to buy this car is borne out of a frustrating and, in retrospect, avoidable situation, but I am thankful that I am a version of myself that can afford it. A version of myself that will go into the next week and drive it to a job that he loves and that, despite its stresses, fulfills him. A version of myself that will now drive it home to a family that eagerly awaits his return, and who he’s missed even in the matter of hours that it’s taken to complete the whole process.

The 21-year-old will return, as he so often does. Within the same amount of time that separates him from the 41-year-old, they will be joined by a third man - one who is nearing retirement age; a man whose oldest son is now on his way out of college and embarking on a world that he doesn’t understand as well as he thought, as the young always do. And the process will begin anew, as it always does.

-cs

1. The global confluence does not escape me, either. In 2004 we were staring down an election year that offered no promise that any of our grievances would be addressed, or any of our situations made better, and the major world powers were exploiting the aftermath of a horrific and hateful act of violence in order to collude in a war against a region and population that they had long deemed undesirable and standing in the way of providence. In saecula saeculorum.