by Jim Mcinvale

Created on: November 29, 2009

For Your Birthday, I Give You the Meaning of Life

The body I drive around won't make it to one hundred. It wasn't built for that. If I'm lucky, and if I take good care of it - eighty, or maybe ninety max. The trick is to roll up the windows and play the radio loud so you don't have to think about it, and for God's sake, never look at the odometer. Same for all this other traffic - they are all hauling ass around, in a big damn hurry to get somewhere, when the only place they'll end up is in a salvage yard. A lot of 'em crash and that's the end of it. Some people give up, park it on the shoulder, then get out and start walking. Others just got stuck with lemons. You shouldn't make too much of any of it that's just the breaks.

For a long time, I envied those sleek luxury cars and the hot, sexy muscle cars. Eventually though, I realized that their engines wore and the paint faded same as mine. Door dings and bugs recognize no status. Mine is an old pick-up not pretty, light on class and style, but functional. It gets me around just fine; does its job, and I don't have to park half a mile from nowhere just to protect the paint.

Whether they are showroom new or old, smoking clunkers, they all give us independence and power. They make us feel invulnerable - like we are in control. People aren't very good at handling power. To a greater or lesser extent, the cloak of power corrupts everyone that dons it. Probably because we all know deep down that we can't control anything that really matters. It sometimes sucks to be self-aware and mortal. Anyway, when you see other drivers out there throwing their weight around - cutting you off, and driving like half-drunk monkeys, try not to blow a gasket. They're probably the same as you, but the power has taken a hold on them.

You hear a lot about what it's supposed to mean: 'it's not how many highways you drive, but how many sights you see', or, 'what really matters is how you treat the other drivers'. The truth is nobody knows what it all means, or even if it means anything at all. So far, all I can say (and I say it about once a year) is that it is better to keep having birthdays than not.

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