but wait!

I truly am in danger of signing up for a new "cage", so called by true biker dudes.  Hey, I'm a biker dude, except that when I'm gotten up in leathers, passing tourists literally fall over - no kidding - laughing at the sight.  Can't hardly blame them.  But I don't wear bright striped running shoes that look like boats, along with logowear, which makes me less the clown.  It's all a matter of perspective, right? There is no look I can inhabit, but that I am a fool on the road for sure, good buddy.

But, as a dollars and cents calculation, I almost have to, since this time I'm going properly to sense the impending final sunken cost thousands $$$ before they are sent down that rathole, and preemptively score one more consumptive point for the Gipper, bless his always addled soul. It's almost my duty in these few days before Barack gets sworn in (and the prices rise again), and the French lose their high ground to become, yet another time, only garlic smelly and unwashed frogs disdaining the darkies among them. 

Yo!  Bush!  Motha!  Buy this!  (I sent my economic incentive check straight to the Obama campaign.  So why do I feel so patriotic now?  Is this like goodbye sex? Which truly is the sweetest, I declare!)

Surely the trains won't be running in time for me not to own a set of wheels.  Those darn Dems will likely resurrect the addled (did I say that already?) auto industry, and just like the co-opted sixties, will spin this final final gasp of Savage Capitalism (soon to be called by Frenchies Freedom Capitalism, and they'll mean it) into its strung out inverse probitive parody.  And I can't single handedly make things change.  Gotta have a car, right?

This time I'm going to wear those tires down to the very quick though, snowstorms be damned (though there is something extremely disconcerting about heading down a steep hill and finding that the brakes do absolutely nothing in the snow), suck the very juice out of my anti-freeze (not that way, please) before it needs a flush and fill, and I know the thermostat is flaky.  The front bearings are growling, and I can't believe the shocks or engine really have another few hundred thou in them.  

So, this time I'm going to game the system, get the flesh-only trade-in price (keeping soul coyly hidden), and decrease my payments below what would be my mounting monthly repair and upkeep costs.  Hell, it worked for my Harley (selling for a price plus the cost of needed repairs -about which I was entirely up front - which still far exceeded the cost of a new one!).

Or is there something bubbleicious about this plan?  Do my rationalizations sound more like ad copy than sound planning?  But the new car could run on french fry oil. . .   But but but . . . 

I feel so implicated.  I know that normal people just throw out those plastic food packages, but I really actually do reuse and reuse and reuse them.  I have had so very few cars for those literal millions of miles I've driven.  Surely I get points in someone's heaven for this.

Whose fundamentalism do I inhabit, and which would I like to inhibit?  My literary structuralist (read modernist) training reminds me that, structurally, Kurtzweil and Falwell are saying precisely the same thing. It's the same story, and so avowed atheist really simply protests a bit too much, methinks, as surely does avowed God believer who wallows in the slime for a fact.

My fundamentalism hinges on a cosmic joke; surfing the Zizakian wavicle of accepted paradox, which makes my story - *gasp* and double *choke* structurally identical to the Jesus story as properly and not fundamentalistically told (nor Catholically, sad to relate).  Not my story, for chrissakes (I know you're thinking I'm thinking that, rapacious reader)!!!  I mean the story I'm trying so hard to relate. The story of paradox and impossible divinity of actual flesh.  The story that though there are no perfect circles in nature out there, there is something special about that species which can true perfect circles in here.  That beauty is real and worthy of possession, but that in the possessing, the accomplishment has got to be release, so that life moves beyond the stinking self.

Metaphor scintillates and never leads.

This becomes a bit unnerving, especially in the face of life decisions (just now I was bopping in car with daughter to a set of songs about riding my disco stick (!!!!) and how sometimes a woman just needs a boy and I'm going to take you home and nasty something - I always have trouble with lyrics, being perfectly at home in the beat) which are and should be so simple.

So, is Buffalo where it was or where it will be?  Is Seattle dead and has been?  What about these great and wonderful United States of Promise (gone or yet to come?)?  Is there really a moral dimension to sex, and if so why?  And what is, precisely now, the linkage between inside and out which makes us truly want the one sold from the attractive facade more than the one from Walmart (well, we used to)? Is it all and always about only price?  (we've established that already, Mac, but for the record, I will not bargain away my loyalty to that dealer, no matter how attractive the other offers, and no matter if they don't love me back.  I've always been a dweeb about cutting the best deal, and seem fine living with that in a world where a pretty good bet about a blond in an SUV is what she does for a living, even though the terms are longer, and the price of beans very much depends on where you do your shopping and if you literally worship at the temple of dollar value)

I can't and won't buy my car from the place which has a latte bar (is this a clue about where I belong between Buffalo and Seattle?), because I just know that I'm gonna get Spitzered there. But the other more scruffy place might lowboy me into spending more than I should because they just don't know how to outsource bean counting well enough.

Oh worra worra.

Can one plan drive?  Can one drive a plan.  Can one opt not to drive?  Can one sit still and by sitting, still live?

OK, so the savage capitalist in me knows perfectly well that the starving minions in sweatshops all over the globe servicing my privilege to brand my very authentic soul are actually in a dance no more vulgar than is the zebra's dance with her devouring tiger.  I blithely eat my meat, even though I do actually know (was this GB Shaw?) that there are no meat eaters who have visited an abbattoir.  Bull? Bull!

Fundamentalists all need somehow to hide these aweful facts from their Tammy Faye realities.

And still the choices seem to have moment.  To screw or not to screw?  To love, to live, to drive and drive and drive in service to what has become so beastly seeming, Biblically.

I do insist, however, that this act be comedy.  On that I do insist.  We've had enough of "dying for."  The fated end.  The clown burns his money, and continues smiling.  His want is your amusement.