Clawing Back Some Mindspace

Defecting from Car Worship

A few weeks ago I was sitting in a local pharmacy, waiting for yet another Covid booster. It was a nice place, quite informal, and I found myself listening to the chatter of the people behind the counter. 

They were talking about "floaters," who in this context are employees of the larger company who float along like a stray coconut from island to island in a large chain of islands, or archipelago of stores. They fill in whenever there is a gap - perhaps someone is still on the water in his fishing boat, wrestling with a very large tuna who just won't quit. Or perhaps someone had to go to the dentist.

After a while the conversation came to focus on one floater in particular. Let's call him Fred. 

Fred, it turns out, was famous as the floater who never stopped talking. One of the people behind the counter - let's call him Joe - recalled a time when Fred talked for an hour straight about the high price of gasoline in New Jersey and the high price of parking in Philadelphia. Around the one-hour point Joe said that he didn't drive and didn't own a car. Joe then asked the other two workers who were there behind the counter whether they drove or owned a car, and they said no. Then Joe turned to Fred and told him that his audience was entirely uninterested in the high price of gas in New Jersey and the high price of parking in Philadelphia, and requested a change of subject.

As I left the pharmacy, feeling slightly light-headed, I found that my vicarious ride along the Gulf Stream had gotten me to thinking. I don't know about you, but there are days when I actually forget that I own a car. It's a nice car, and I'm quite fond of it, and, because of the state of our transportation system, I can't do without it.

But I don't fetishize it. I haven't looked at cars that way since I was a teenager. 

I think I just assumed there were a lot of people like me. And perhaps there are, at least in Philadelphia. And I guess that Fred thinks that everyone in America is just like him. And perhaps he's more right than I am.

But when Fred was declaiming for an hour, 75 percent of the people in his little group behind the counter didn't own cars, didn't drive, and didn't care about the price of gas. That put me in new territory - the idea that people aren't interested in the price of gas. It had never occurred to me that such people existed.

Maybe cars are starting to lose their stranglehold on the American imagination. At least in some places.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, movie studios floundered around looking for a new class of awful, evil, terrible villains. What will the studios do when the car chase doesn't rivet the audience?

I guess there's a downside to everything.

See also Looking and Not Seeing, Listening and Not Hearing; The Space-Time Continuum.