Another installment of my embarrassing audio stories!
Driving is SCARY, you guys. It didn’t seem that scary when I was first learning as a teenager, but became increasingly more terrifying in the subsequent years I spent not driving. And I saw a lot of scary things on the subway: once I nodded off after a long day at Publicolor (I had an uncanny ability to fall asleep on the train and still wake up at the right stop), and woke up a few stops before home because I felt like I was being shoved. It turns out a guy sitting across from the guy next to me took offense to something he’d said, and decided to beat the crap out of him. I felt like I was being shoved because the guy next to me was getting pummeled.
What did I do? What everyone else did: stood up, and got as far away from the two fighters as we could until the next stop, when the conductor threw the instigator off the train. The other guy spit a mouthful of blood onto the floor and paced back and forth, high on adrenaline, yelling “Fuck! Fuck!” over and over again. The rest of us simply got off the train car, moved to the next train car down, and continued our ride as usual.
Still, driving is scarier. I know it’s fallacious to assume something “unnatural” is dangerous, but I do think piloting a two-ton machine is a dangerous, unnatural thing, and we completely take it for granted. I also think it’s easier to learn how to do it when you’re a teenager, because your own mortality is beyond your comprehension. Unless you’re a goth, and even then, you’re only thinking about danger and mortality in an abstract, poetic sense.
Anyway, I never got my license, and never had a goth phase, but I guess it’s never too late for either. And apparently, it’s never too late for acne. Sigh.
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