I've been learning how to drive. I spent years never wanting to, terrified that a second's misjudgment could introduce me to people I've never met in the wrong kind of way, the empty seat at the table as much mine as the one who's missing. So instead my relationship with cars has been high speed obstacles to dodge in badly planned crossings, rush hour audiences for messages of cloth that a stage won't cut it for, and a perfect symbol for what humanity has become from the side of a busy highway... watching the endless stampede go by like I'm not there, waiting for a car without flashing red and blue lights to take interest in me, that one in a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, to take me where I already know that it's going, just thirty more miles.

But I got tired of asking other people for distance without even a right foot to offer in return, and I never wanted to get to a point where my foot could save a friend or a stranger and I didn't know how, so I talked myself into getting my permit before I could talk myself out of it.

Now I drive the careful kind of reckless, or maybe the other way around, or maybe that's just how it feels inside the world's deadliest weapon that I still forget how to turn off half the time. I spend every drive thinking of catastrophe, asking in every crossing that looks like a screech honk bang in the making who'd have to pay for new windshields or teeth or restitution because there are so many ways to break or get broken with the flick of a wrist, and wherever there's wreckage there's got to be someone stuck with the bill and it's not always the one who hurts least, it's the one who broke the most rules along the way.

The Colorado Driver's Manual has a section on pets and wildlife and how to deal with them when they cross your path. It says that nobody wants to hit an animal but most of the time you have no other choice. Dogs and cats and squirrels are too small to cause any damage, but there's an art to hitting deer the right way, at the least cost to your vehicle. Either way, it says, do not try to avoid them. You risk more by trying to save them. You have the right of way. Roll on.

I know no better metaphor for modern society than a busy highway: a collection of individuals that mean you no harm transforming together into a force far more terrifying than all of its pieces that will kill you for walking across it or breaking ranks once you've entered, a tag team firing squad where all the participants swear their weapon was loaded with blanks until called in front of a line of gunmen all swearing the exact same thing. The sides of the highways are lined with the dead of every species, including our own, but you cause more pain and trouble by trying to do something different then you do by just moving forward in a straight line. There’s a certain amount of carnage you’ve gotta be OK with creating to make it from point A to point B, and you’ll never make it anywhere if you pull over to check on everything you see bleeding on the side of the highway.