Car Friends

Old men in the steam room at the gym say the same things about business every day.  These days I go there just to see if the prime rate has helped any of them lose weight; but for men over a certain age stress fattens them up until it pushes them over. 

Someone scraped the fender of my car in the gym parking lot and I had a moment. The camera on the parking lot was facing the wrong way. We saw what may have been the offending vehicle leaving, and I heard myself make sad puppy noises until I decided to just walk away.

Now I notice that so many of these entries revolve around cars. What happens in them, and what happens to them. They are our mechanical pets after all.

In an industrial part of town I needed to get some kind of wax (because large bronze sculptures don’t buffer themselves), and in the early evening light I saw the silhouettes of people walking to take their taxis home. They looked like sculptures too. Depleted of personality, and looking like cut-outs, they expressed nothing more than the functionality of the human body.

I wondered at the fact that we give our cars names, when we seldom find out what our waiters or neighbours are called.

I can’t say that in future I’m going learn and remember who absolutely everyone is. But it seems weird that even artworks get named — and yet so many strangers pass one another without any mutual recognition, on the street.