Case in point: I had a meeting with my sister last night at a place I’d never been. She sent me the directions in an email about a week ago. They said that the place was located

in St. Louis Park, just off of
highway 100 and 394. take 94 to 394 west, to 100
south, to cedar lake rd exit. take a right on the
first driveway you see into Parkdale Plaza. The
address is XXXX South Highway 100″

These are not difficult directions to follow, had I noticed them. Instead, however, I noticed the handy little icon on the side of my GMail screen that said “Map This”, like this:

So, sensing that Google Map’s directions to the place would be better than my sisters (and more techy!), I clicked that.

Problem. A sensible human being will notice that Google is offering to map a completely different address (one it had picked up from an earlier e-mail in the chain). So the map I received gave me excellent directions to the wrong place. If I had read my sister’s e-mail, I might have realized that.

Instead, I trusted Google to read her e-mail for me, assuming it would figure out where she wanted me to go on its own. Google is, sadly, incapable of having meaningful interactions with my sister via e-mail. So it got confused and got me lost:

The Minnesota Department of Transportation announced last week that roadside memorials, while an understandable expression of grief, were an unsafe distraction to drivers. They contacted the families of those who’ve died on our state’s roadways and advised them that their signs, crosses, balloons, etc., would be removed after a reasonable length of time.

These kinds of displays are already banned on interstate highways and freeways, but MnDOT said from now on the signs will be removed from rural highways after six months.

It’s true, the signs are probably distractions to drivers – people tend to slow down or at least turn their heads to get a better look. But they’re also a reminder – someone died here – of how dangerous driving is. There are myriad signs on our highways; they tell us how fast to go, when to turn, when to stop, and when not to stop. But there aren’t any road signs out there that indicate how incredibly dangerous driving is.

There are no “Drive Safely” signs hanging off of overpasses. There are no “Check You Blind Spot” warnings on freeway onramps. There are “Slippery When Wet” signs but none that say “Deadly When Not Careful”.

Maybe they should just sprinkle the highways with informational signs, every ten miles or so, that express the real nature of what it is you’re doing with yourself every time you get in the car. Close to 600 people die on the roads in Minnesota every year. That’s almost two a day. In 2003, car crashes were the leading cause of death for people between the ages of 1 and 33. The highest number of crashes last year occurred from 4pm to 8pm. Rush hour; you’re in it every day.

Why are the roads so dangerous? Well, there’s one obvious culprit; alcohol. It accounts for about 30% of the deaths in Minnesota (in which at least one of the drivers had been drinking). I don’t think you need a sign to make clear that if you drive a car while drunk, you’re going to make deadly mistakes. But what about the other 70%?

Twenty-one percent of the people killed in 2002 in Minnesota were in crashes where driver inattention was cited as a cause. That’s 137 highway memorials that can be attributed to someone not paying attention. And I think that stems from an ingrained problem with drivers today; people forget that cars are dangerous.

You see them everywhere – doing their makeup, brushing their teeth, filling out paperwork, or just driving along obliviously as if their car were on rails and surrounded by an impenetrable wall. You’ve probably done it, too. I have. It’s easy to forget that you’re riding along at 60 mph in a thinly-masked explosive device, because cars are comfortable. They have accessories (stereos, air-conditioning, vanity mirrors, heated seats). They aren’t hard to use; you tap a pedal to speed up, you tap a pedal to slow down, you turn the wheel. No cranking or pushing or waiting.

So it’s easy to start thinking about cars as extensions of our bodies; like a faster form of walking. You don’t concern yourself too much about safety if you’re just walking down the street; why should you if you’re just driving down the highway? It’s not that people don’t know cars are dangerous; everyone knows that. People wear their seatbelts. But knowing they’re dangerous and recognizing that every moment in a car you’re seconds away from being dead are very different things.

I’m not saying everyone needs to freak out and ride bicycles to work. Bikes can be dangerous too, you know. For that matter, walking isn’t that safe, either. But biking and walking are to driving like slingshots and swords are to guns. You can hurt yourself with a slingshot if you’re not careful, but I’d like to see you try to kill yourself with one (OK, not really, but it’s funny to think about).

With a gun, a very small mistake can lead to very dire consequences. It’s the same in a car. I doubt people would try to operate a handgun while at the same time shaving and talking on the phone, because guns are guns, and they’re for killin’. But cars aren’t viewed that way, and that’s a problem.

So as MnDOT starts pulling down memorials over the next few months, maybe they should start putting up other signs in their places. For each memorial, for each spot where somebody died in a car crash, they should place signs that read, simply, “PAY ATTENTION.”

Statistics in this post come from: The Minnestoa Office of Traffic Safety .

“But that’s impossible,” we said to each other, observing him from the front porch. “We just put a new parking permit on your dashboard last week.”

We live on a fairly quiet block, and most people have garages, so parking is never really terrible. But Luther Seminary is just down the street, and the U of M Saint Paul campus isn’t that far away, so every once in a while during the week the spots fill up. For that reason, our whole neighborhood is under a one-hour-parking-except-with-permit order. So, for ten dollars a year, we got permits, mostly because we can, but also because they permit zone extends all the way over to the university, so it comes in handy.

That said, I don’t think I’ve ever not been able to park on my block when I’ve needed to. Sometimes I don’t get the prized spot right in front of the house, and sometimes I have to park across the street, where parking is unregulated and I wouldn’t need a permit anyway. But for the most part the permit is a status symbol.

And it upheld its status as a symbol on Saturday, when it came to symbolize the stupidity of the permit-parking racket. By the time I finally (after about two seconds) got up the nerve to walk out and ask this cop (a “parking enforcement” cop, his car indicated in broadly-painted letters) what he was doing, there was really no doubt as to what he was doing. He was about to leave a fresh $30 ticket on my girlfriend’s car, despite her obvious compliance with the parking-permit ordinance.

I should have stormed out glaring and said, “Hey, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” This is, after all, my house, and I do, after all, pay a 50-some-dollar ‘curb’ fee every year. And she was parked right in front, in that prized spot of curb that I have diligently paid for. All these facts and some others were behind me, but he had a uniform and a Crown Vic; intimidation.

“Hi,” I said, in a nice, concerned voice, as if I had been the one who’d called him here.

“This your car?” he said, returning to filling out the ticket before I’d answered.

“Yeah… but it’s got a permit.”

“Did you read the instructions? You have to have it on the driver’s side. You’ve got it on the passenger side. I couldn’t see it.”

Ignore, for a moment, his rude refusal to let me explain that, no, of course I hadn’t read the instructions, it’s a parking permit, for the sake of Jesus; you put in on your dashboard, what instructions? Focus instead on this utter, incomprehensible incoherence: the permit that he COULDN’T SEE was on the passenger side, not the driver’s side, where it was required to be.
So what was he looking at when he examined the passenger’s side dashboard to note its lawlessly placed permit? Was it a ghost image of the offending 3×4-inch plastic card? Was it the aura of my girlfriend’s nefarious intention to misplace the permit?

IT WAS THE FREAKING PERMIT. Fool.

Add to that the undeniable fact that on this Saturday, as on most, the double-dead-ending stretch of Fulham Street on which I make my home was bare; the cars were outnumbered by open spaces like echoes in the Grand Canyon. What on earth was this “police officer” doing driving up and down an obscure street (come on Saint Paulites, I dare you to tell me where it is without MapQuesting it) giving tickets to people who had every right to park there?

Collecting revenue, that’s what. For the city. Which has already collected revenue off that same spot several times (I pay the damned curb-fee, and I pay property taxes). And what’s more, I was paying them to do it. I don’t know what cops make these days – maybe $20 an hour plus benefits. Whatever it is they deserve it. But not this guy; not with my tax dollars; not for roving around conning honest, reasonable people out of money they may not have time to fight for.

If I hadn’t walked out the door at that minute, my remaining option would have been to contest the ticket, which can only be done during business hours (i.e. I’d have to take off work) and usually takes at least an hour (lines, etc., I know, I’ve done it before). Meanwhile, all the clerks and janitors and receptionists are being paid – again with public money – to spend that time sorting out a bogus parking ticket that would’ve been ridiculous even if I hadn’t had the permit.

Sometimes the scale of government waste is just mind-boggling, especially when it shows up in a little red-striped envelope tucked under your windshield-wiper.

Ah, but a Crown Vic and a uniform (not to mention a firearm) will only intimidate so much. I worked up a steely glower and threw my eyes at his forehead:

“I’ll move it.”

And, with me in the car moving the parking permit that he couldn’t see to its appropriate location, it became somewhat silly for him to continue issuing punishment. He grumbled something meekly and hurried off to his car.

The rear lights (brake and signal) have been broken even since my sister backed the car out of my parent’s garage and into the garage across the alley. Unfortunately the door of the garage across the street was closed.

She backed out too fast, basically.

OK, so that was about four years ago. Since then the shattered plastic light coverings have become receptacles for rainwater, bird poop and (I can only assume) the fluid waste of confused/drunk passers-by. Whether all that impaired my ability to warn trailing cars of impending stops and turns is uncertain. The most probable answer is: probably.

So today after work I made my way over to ACE Auto Parts and Salvage on Rice Street just north of University. This is a neighborhood that is known for its auto salvage places and, literally, its junk yards (as in front and back yards with junk in them).

Ace Auto Parts and Salvage on Rice Street is the craziest place you’ll ever go to, or if you don’t go, the craziest place you’ll ever not go to. When you walk in the door to the lobby – especially if you are just coming from your job as a communications intern, and are wearing a pressed Polo shirt and khakis – you’re shocked by how dirty things are. Behind a counter in front of computer screens stand seven or eight of the least clean men to even work at a computer.

The computers are the miracle that puts order to the chaos that is the junkyard. In the junkyard there are rows upon rows or ridiculously destroyed cars. It wouldn’t do to say it’s as chaotic as a BLANK, because it’s a junkyard, and the best word to go in the BLANK is “junkyard.” So it’s as chaotic as itself, which is a lot. Just imagine a car dealership that has exploded. Even the dirt paths between the car stacks are encrusted with broken shards of plastic and auto parts.

The computers know about everything in the yard (as it is called by a hand-scrawled sign above the door behind the counter that leads to it), including the bits of plastic on the pathways. I can’t say how junkyards were run before the ascent of desktop computing technology. It must have been confusing.

No longer! I wanted a replacement driver’s side door handle for my 1994 two-door Toyota Tercel, and my customer service representative (a.k.a. guy in grease-stained jeans) knew exactly where to find one. At least, that’s what he said, between answering three telephone lines, yelling instructions at three or four ‘pickers’ (the vultures who collect parts from the dead, decaying cars) and ringing up another customer.

The thing is, the place was packed. At 4:30 in the afternoon on a weekday, an hour before close, I had to wait twenty minutes just to speak to someone with access to the all-knowing computers. Otherwise, there were plenty of waiting customers to talk to – lots of Mexican and Hmong guys – but I felt overdressed.

So many people buying spare parts for their automobiles! Had they all purchased cheaply built Tercels (and then crashed them into neighboring garages) like myself? As it turned out, no. Many of the other customers were just waiting to buy tricked-out 16-inch rims with which to pimp their own rides.

I’ll look into that stuff later (I could really see myself rollin’ on twenty-twos). Today I was just interested in the door handle, which I’ve been without since winter, when it snapped off. After locating the part in the computer, Don (greasy-jeans) yelled out to Danny (greasy-belly) to bring me back to the yard. I was surprised they’d even let me back there; I’d have thought it’d be a liability. But they trusted me. So back I went, behind the laconic Danny, who answered my questions about the functioning of the yard in short bursts.

“How long does a car usually last in the yard before it’s sent to the crusher?”

“Depends.”

“How long have you worked here?”

“Long time.”

And so on. He was friendly, though, and we bonded, sort of, when I told him how my car’s handle had broken off.

“They all do that.”

Yes. Yes they do.

The half-demolished red Tercel we were looking at had a perfectly good driver’s side handle, so I told Danny I’d take it. Then, on a whim, I looked at the rear lights, saw they were in good condition, and decided to take those too.

This was OK by Danny, but turned out to be a mistake. It seems, in a junkyard, that you should never offer to buy something before you know how much it costs. This is probably true in any retail endeavor, I now realize. But I was excited, and also naïve.

Each taillight cost $45 dollars, a number Don (we were back inside now) pretended to take from the computer but which, in truth, he invented on the spot. I wavered for four seconds, and he knocked ten bucks off the price. I probably should’ve wavered some more, but again, I was excited and also naïve.

So I had a $90 set of taillights with exceptionally bad collision karma. But the door handle would have to wait; it was harder to get off the donor vehicle, and Don said he’d have it for me the next day.

Still, I was happy. Repairing your own automobile is not necessarily cheap and not necessarily safe, but it leaves you feeling useful, like your pressed shirt doesn’t exclude you from the world of dirty fingernails and disorganized yelling. And so it’s not without excitement that I wait to go back tomorrow to stand in line for my door handle. Soon, my ride will be pimped, my hands will be dirty, and I’ll be a little less naïve.

And next time, when Danny and I are making our way out through the yard, we’ll have a little more to talk about.

This was the largest car my sister and I had ever seen (I was 10, she was 14). Like scientists observing an unusually intelligent primate, we stood back, stroking our chins, assessing our new rolling domain.

Our previous car had been a red 1979 Chevrolet Monza, which we called simply “El Monza”. Still today if you say “El Monza” around my family everyone will know what you’re talking about. It was a small two-door sports car that was first owned by commercial-airline pilot. I don’t know how we knew that, it was just always self-evident, the kind of thing you could tell just by looking at it. “Oh, look at that small red car that was once owned by a jumbo-jet pilot.”

In 1979, El Monza was probably a good car for cruising around with stewardesses. It had a long, sloping hatch-back, so if you put the seats down you could lie in the back with the trunk open, watching the starts. I did this once with my dad on camping trip to Red Wing, so I can’t imagine why the pilot wouldn’t have done it with his buxom blondes.

In 1986, when my parents bought the car at a thrift-store car-auction, the hatchback trunk had acquired a more practical purpose. By then, the driver’s side door had succumbed to a mysterious malfunction, and that left only two other entrances: the passenger side door and the trunk. My preference was for going in via the trunk, when at all possible. I liked the crawl across the ragged black carpeting and the awkward flip into the back seats.

The minivan, by comparison, with its three working doors (four counting the trunk), was an explosion in car-quality improvements. It had a stereo (El Monza had a kick-ass eight-track deck, which kicked the asses of a few absurdly bad Neil Diamond tapes by ruining them…more so). It also had air conditioning, which as far as I know didn’t exist before 1992. And cup holders (how-did-they-get-through-the-70s-without-them).

These things, combined with the charming/annoying crappiness of El Monza, meant that for me, the van was the greatest car ever made. In reality, it was as stripped-down as it could possibly get; no tape deck (remember, it was 1992, CDs still took up whole rooms in the Pentagon), no power anything, no reclining seats. It was a vacant shell of a car, no frills, no comforts, nothing.

And yet, I loved it. I proclaimed myself a Dodge loyalist from that moment forth; I swore never to buy a car of any other make. My sister and I dreamed of all the things we could do with the expansive area behind the back seats. Forts! Beds! TVs!

A child’s imagination is so fertile, it doesn’t take much to get it fired up. A new car, even one that I now recognize as being utterly mediocre, was more than enough.

But my excitement was not unrestrained. I remember driving by other, less fortunate families in their beat-up Corsicas and LeBarons and thinking, “It’s not right that our family should have such a nice car while those people have nothing. It’s just not right.” This is the same kind of thought some people have when they see a starving African child on TV during the course of a steak dinner. Expect a stripped-down 1992 Dodge Caravan, even brand new, is no steak dinner. And only a person who’d never before been in a new car could ever think that there was something excessive about it.

Since then my family has gone through a sort of new-car mania. My mom got a new Honda Civic and a new Subaru Outback in the space of five years. My dad just replaced the old van after months of having the engine stall at critical moments (like merging on the highway). My promise of loyalty (long-ago abandoned) lives on in him: he bought a brand-new 2003 Dodge Caravan. But nothing matches the feeling of that first new car.

Me, I’m still milking the family’s second-ever new car, a 1994 Toyota Tercel (El Turdcel) that has no AC, no odometer, and good old-fashioned hand-cranked windows. Best of all, it has a completely malfunctioning driver’s side door.

Just give me a friendly stewardess, a few Neil Diamond tapes, and the open road.

But I don\’t need to imply, because it\’s true. All that coasting and gliding and driving slow paid off; my car gets hybrid-like mileage. In a way, it is a hybrid. Part car, part me, we work together in pursuit of efficiency.

I have to admit, I\’ve been musing on the possibility of getting a new car. A real hybrid would be nice, but there\’s a two-year waiting period to get one (demand>supply). And, let\’s be honest, I can\’t afford to buy a new car anyway.

But it sure would be nice to have a driver\’s side door handle. And a trunk that didn\’t collect rainwater, even when closed.

Sometimes I think a new car would make me a new man; crisp, clean, and watertight. A quietly purring silver Honda – four doors, no less – in my driveway would really bring me to a new level of personhood.

It\’s like this; the degree to which you\’ve made the transition to adulthood depends on how much of your life you could show to the people you work with. Example: I\’d feel pretty good about inviting my co-workers over to my house for a barbeque. It\’s not perfect, no, but we\’re working on it, and it\’s nothing to be ashamed of.

If, on the other hand, my boss\’s car broke down and he needed a ride home, even the walk to my car would be embarrassing.

\”This is you car?\” he would say.

\”Heh heh. Yeah,\” I\’d reply, before warning him about the smell and the cramped seating. And, in my ultimate moment of humiliation, asking him to reach over and open the driver\’s side door.

No. There is just no way. If his car broke down I would gladly wait with him until help came, but my car is off limits to co-workers.

So there you go. My transition to adulthood is yet unfinished. My home, my girlfriend, my family; all of those are safe for work. But my car is a secret only I can bear to know.

Still, there are other times when I think a new car would just be a weak front for who I really am. Within weeks it would dinged and dented. And before long something would break off. The signal lever, a windshield wiper, something.

I would try to keep it clean. I\’d try to get the oil changed regularly. But we all know I\’d just be trying to swim in someone else\’s flippers.

With the Turdcel, I can be myself. I can bump it into to things; no big deal, it\’s already dented. I can forget to change the oil; so what? I forgot to change the oil for the first four years I drove it.

And if that means getting in the passenger side door, and refusing to help out my co-workers in times of need, well, I can deal with that. Because this cars knows me, it doesn\’t care about my transition to adulthood. It doesn\’t want me to be crisper or cleaner, or watertight.

It just wants me to help it get 38 miles to the gallon.

And if we can keep doing that together, we\’ll never need anyone else.

Both are as obvious as three fingers slammed in a car door, but only one doesn\’t add up. And only one is making me feel like, well, slamming my fingers in a car door.

It’s the gas prices, the arbiter of all things automotive, the sword by which we live and die.

My trusty Toyota Tercel usually gets around 30 miles to the gallon. The gallon being of refined petroleum; the miles being air-conditioned-less.

But I’m not complaining. My car is four cylinders of pure driving excitement, especially when you get up to around 70 mph, and it starts quaking like a Slinky.

Still, I started a new job a few weeks ago, and my commute is up to 30 minutes. That’s about 15 miles, and most of the drive is on the freeway, at quaking speeds.

So I’m driving about 30 miles a day, not counting wherever I go after work. My gas tank, bless its little heart, only holds about 10 gallons – there are SUVs out there that carry more windshield-wiper fluid than that.

Oh, how I wish my car ran on windshield-wiper fluid. Or, barring that, that I at least had some windshield wiper fluid.

Because at the rate I’ve been going through gas, I can’t afford any. Every week I’m putting a steak dinner’s worth of gas into my car, and every week it asks for more. At the end of the month, as you can probably calculate, that leaves me very, very lacking in the steak department.

So I’ve resolved to increase my gas mileage. My goal is 100 miles to the gallon. It will take some practice – it’s an art, after all – but I think I can do it. And I’ve already made some progress.

For starters, I try to be in neutral as much as possible. I drive a manual transmission, so the opportunities for coasting are frequent. Any downward slope or flat stretch of road is reason to shift. Even a subtle wind at my back sends the clutch down.

And then I glide, basking in the glory of momentum, saying to my car, “We’re saving gas! We’re saving gas!”

I loathe the accelerator. When I must, I poke at it with the tip of foot, as if it were a dead animal. When I have no option but to climb a hill, I grudgingly depress the gas pedal. “We are wasting gas,” I say to the car. “Sweet mercy, we are WASTING GAS!”

It’s gotten so bad that I’m starting to dislike using any of the pedals. Just the other night I caught myself coasting down a big hill, behind a city bus. As it slowed to pick up passengers, I sort of panicked. I knew I had to hit the brakes, but as I did, I caught myself thinking, “Uh-oh, don’t touch the pedals…”

Using the brakes doesn’t directly deplete your gas supply, but it does decrease your speed. And isn’t there a universal law that holds: what slows down must speed up, and what speeds up must use gas?

My real objective here is to break the laws of physics and economics (as opposed to the speed limit). I want something for nothing. I want to drive to work every day and never see the little white needle hang its head.

I know I can’t live this way; none of us can, it’s just too much work. But it’s going to take a while for me to get used to paying over $2 for gas, and until I do, I’m going to keep practicing. So if you see me crawling along I-94 at 8 mph, I’m either on the end of a really good coast, or I’m out of gas.

If it’s the former, give me a honk and a wave; I’ll need all the support I can get.

If it’s the latter, and you’re feeling charitable, do me a favor. Drop off a can of gas for me. Or at least toss a bottle of wiper fluid out the window.

So I got up at 6:45, thinking I would shower, eat a good breakfast and still have a little time to look over my class notes.

But when I got out to my car, the key wouldn\’t turn. The locks were frozen stiff.

Why were they frozen stiff, when it is March and it wasn\’t even very cold? I don\’t know. But they were. And my tube of lock de-icer was right where it shouldn\’t have been; inside the locked car.

After kicking the door several times and jiggling the key around for five minutes, I was able to unlock the door. But an unlocked door and a locked door are equally useless when the door itself is FROZEN SHUT.

Kicks and jiggles didn\’t help. I tried breathing hot air on the seam, but that probably made things worse.

Fortunately though, my trusty Tercel was built with cheap plastic door handles that can break easily. I knew this when I started pulling on the handle, but it was getting late and, somewhere in the deep part of my mind, I think I wanted to tempt fate.

Well, she was tempted. The handle snapped off like the unlucky end of a wishbone. The deflated feeling I had at that moment was almost comic, until I ended it with a loud obscenity.

Realizing didn\’t have time to lament my tragic door-handle fate, I walked around to the passenger side. There I found, also, the lock and the door frozen. But no exam-induced impatience could cause me to yank at the fragile door handle.

No, instead, I did what I should have done the first time. I rubbed the door-seams with my hands, warming them. To speed things up, I even rubbed my body against the door a little. Just a little.

Someone walking by would have seen me crouched beside the empty car, arms spread, face against the window, seemingly humping the passenger side door.

There is no end to the humiliation my car inflicts on me.