Car Stories

sometimes i see myself
through the eyes of a stray dog
from an alley across the street
and my whole mission just seems so finite
my whole saga just seems so cheap

-Ani DiFranco, "In the Margins"

To begin with, I was planning to write about all the cars I've had. Most of them I wrecked or destroyed. Unintentionally, of course.

But I put in a CD I haven't listened to in a while, Ani DiFranco's "Reprieve," and it changed my plans.

I have three best friends. They are literally scattered all over the world. Jessica Bowman is in California (and previously Germany), Anita is in Armenia (with the Peace Corps last I heard) and Jessica Caldwell is in Florida.

I met Jessica Caldwell when I was a junior in high school. She had just moved to my city from New Orleans. Imagine her surprise, moving from The City That Care Forgot to The City That Everyone Only Wishes To Forget. Being a small, ridiculously close-minded group of high schoolers, no one was too eager to welcome the New Girl who was "exotic," an outsider.

To be honest, I was no exception. But it wasn't because I was rude. I just didn't pay too much attention to anyone -- or anything -- if I could help it. I had learned my lesson by being stabbed in the back by boys and girls alike.

But once we became friends, we made some of the best memories together of any I have and hold dear to this very day.

This CD reminds me of those days. The days we used to ride in my Chevrolet Cavalier over miles and miles of dirt roads, radio blaring. We could talk about anything and everything. We could sing at the top of our lungs. We could live in that car without fear of judgement or interference from the outside world. We were alive; we were driving.

I have never felt that way again. I drive in my car blaring music quite often, but never with such carelessness and lightness of heart. I think age beats some of the music out of our hearts. Or maybe we just become too guarded to let it out.

That's one reason that artists like Ani DiFranco amaze me, and make me want to strive to be a better writer, a better person. The music bleeding from her fingers and her throat is incessant. She has released over twenty albums since 1989. She owns her own record label, controlling almost every aspect of the enterprise.

Everything affects her enough to be written about, and written well. And her music isn't just audible notes spliced together to be floated into the world on wings of materialism or escapism. Her music is important. Her messages are urgent, no matter how controversial. Perhaps most importantly, her music grows appendages and walks itself into your life. Her music, the words, the notes have folded themselves into my heart and taken root in the grainy soil of memory.

you are an unruly translucent
a dirty windshield with a shifting view
so many cunning running landscapes
for my dented door to open into
i just wanna tune out all the billboards
weld myself a mental shield
i just wanna put down all the pressures
and feel how i really feel

just show me a moment that is mine
its beauty blinding and unsurpassed
make me forget every moment that went by
and left me so half-hearted
cuz i felt it so half-assed

-A. D., "Half-Assed"