Essay Not About Writing

Some things are like car accidents. They sneak up on you and blammo, not only are you totally blind-sided, but you are bruised and bloodied. A variable heap of skin and bone, confused and scared. Yeah, some things are like that. I won’t go on naming them, though. That would take too long, plus I believe you are smarter than you look.

Dancing is like that, sort of. The music starts and you feel your feet taking you away. At first, you notice that you’re not scared or self-conscious. You feel your parts to make sure they are all there, and you say to yourself, “Man, maybe everything will be OK. I could be luckier than I thought.” But then before you know it, you’re paralyzed and soiling yourself in front of the paramedics (or worse!). Then, for the rest of your years you sit out on the sidelines at concerts, unwilling, or more likely, unable to move to the music.

Painting can be like that too. You’re sitting at home picking your nose, when all of a sudden inspiration hits and you just have to get ice cream. And this is not bowl-of-fruit inspiration, this is Picasso! This is Judith Beheading Holofernes! You must go now to your easel, this creativity must come out. But, of course, you live miles away from the closest late-night convenience store, and it is snowy and dark outside. What was originally unfettered creative genius quickly brings you to the dark ditch on the side of a lonely road. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon turns into Guernica.

The gardener surely knows what I’m talking about. She spends her time fertilizing phlox, feeding her gardenias, cutting back the dahlias. You change the oil, rotate the tires, but nobody can prepare you for that mudslide. Then, much to your chagrin, you are buried under ten tons of sandy sediment, and the gardener has to wake up to a yard full of drowned perennials. You really can’t account for the weather.

An elderly marathoner gets my whole car crash metaphor. Twenty years of training, and of outplacing virile young men, have culminated in one last squeak. He won’t make it to the finish line. Sometimes you just run out of gas. Sometimes the wheels fall of. But he doesn’t see it coming, just like you know deep down inside that Bessie, that old warhorse of a ’67 Chevy, will live longer than you do. But then, before long the poor old guy drops and there’s a pile up in the streets of Boston.

I mean, there is only one other thing that I can think of that really embodies the soul of a car crash. It takes on the properties of that tangled, fiery, terrifying mess. You can draw parallels between the suffering and anxiety of the two phenomena. Sometimes, it’s a smooth highway, other times you’re bleeding from the nose because your face slammed into the desk. Nobody really has to tell you its like that. You just know. Sometimes, you’re hot, on a roll, in the groove of all things new and antiquated, riffing on histories and fantasies. But others, you forget to put on the seat belt in the rag top, and a tree is barreling toward you at 100 miles per hour.