My Mother's Car is Haunted- 02-23-11

I think my mother’s car is haunted. It does not like being opened on the driver’s side sometimes. My grandmother and I would then go around to the passenger side, stick the key in the lock, unlock it, now all the doors are open. Walk around to the driver’s side, get in, and take off, no further problems. The drivers side door only plays this game every once in a while. Since I am always concerned with wasting energy I choose to fight with the lock when it does this. I’d rather fight than make more steps than I have to. Maybe this says something about me? Last night outside of Wegmans Cicero the car decides to pick a fight again. I respond automatically from two dozen years of compacting madness. I try to turn the key. Nothing, won’t move. I stick it in again. Won’t work. I jab it in a third time, turn it toward the front of the car and it lets me, although turning it in that direction would only lock it. I try twisting it to the right, to the rear of the car. Won’t move. I thrust the key in again. I will do fucking battle with spirits, ghosts, poltergeists, demons, angels, whatever. “Mom, let me the fuck in this car, it’s too cold for this shit”, I utter. I turn the key to the right. The lock acquiesces. Now I can get in the car with no problems, just like I should have, just like it should be. Perhaps it is a sign to pause from time to time, look at yourself and your world, look at the vehicle of life and ask yourself if you are happy. And if not, why not? Don’t you like where life has brought you? Where do you see yourself going? How are you trying to get there? I get in the car and take off to go to my girlfriends house and on the way the light of the radio blinks with some kind of intelligent timing, with a noticible intensity that is almost frightening. I would be afraid of ghosts if I believed that they could actually harm me but in my life the only enemy that I’ve ever had to fear was myself. Although ghosts can not kill you, they might be able to lead you to your death. I note the blinking of the radio, tell myself its some kind of loose electrical connection, ignore it to pay attention to traffic, and the backlight to the digital symbols goes dark, resentful that I don’t get the message it is trying get across. The radio stays dark for the few minutes it takes me to get to the girlfriends driveway. I consciously think of my mother’s car as her sarcophagus with some part of her remaining as we do in the place that we haunt in life, the places where we spend the most time, investing our physical, mental, and spiritual energies. I wonder what my mother thought driving around in her 1998 Toyota Camry LE. “Hope this car doesn’t break down, I’ll have to rely on my drunk and drug addict friends, can’t rely on my son whose only ambition in life was to drive around Central New York all day, smoking pot, getting into trouble, and unbeknownst to me, come to live with me when his grandmother has used up all of her earthly energies, a parasitical deadbeat parasite that I would have been unable to get rid of, unless he got arrested again, which is highly probable”.  I wonder if my mother in her driving ever felt the urges that I do, to talk to myself, sometimes soothing, sometimes quite harshly, yell invented stupidities at other distracted drivers, sing, sometimes sarcastically, sometimes seriously, other times mournfully, screaming the things that I can’t say in real life, the inner narration that festers but can’t ever be mentioned to the people it is directed at, telling myself jokes and barking out loud when they’re funny, endlessly trying to improve my comedic hits to misses and strike outs, relating my inner world into my voice recorder for later transcription, praying that some hidden cop isn’t thinking I’m talking on a cell phone, who will pull me over and to get out of a ticket I will play for him the spillage of insanity that is going unnoticed by most people, that I hope to work into a story line or decorate some narration with it, but whose meaning will be lost on the cop, then will he notice the aroma of illegal vegetation, now I’ve got tickets for distracted driving, driving while under the influence, other various things. Done for today, see you tomorrow.