The Great American Roadtrip was one of many contemporary
legends. The freedom of the open road, mile after mile of asphalt that
crisscrossed the continent like bicep scars. A place where dreams came true, love blossomed and
teens would come of age into fully grown adult human citizens. Across the
decades, the highways were romanticised from films like Easy Rider, Thelma and
Louise and Vanishing Point, setting the scene for a hip new generation to burn
rubber and find themselves in a country that had sacrificed itself to the automobile.
For an American, going on a road trip was a pilgrimage with no destination. It
was their own form of opera, a cultural expression built around oil, speed and
individualism. It was as American as it got, so much so, to remove the road trip from its societal memory would be to deny the very essence of what it meant to be American.
You didn't need to leave your car to get food, be entertained, go to work or even sleep. Since the 1940s, government officials have designed cities around the automobile than the human being. They envisaged the car as a kind of mech that would transport a human pilot through the urban environment, with sidewalks and parks being replaced with multilane highways and car lots. The issue of verticality would be solved by a simple ramp system, with plans later on that cars would enter entire sections of road that would go up and down as an elevator, but instead designers realised they could just keep piling roads on top of each other. Mile after mile of interstate was suspended in the air on concrete columns that mingled with power lines and chimneys that formed the outer crust of industrial areas. You could sleep, work, live and die in your car. The car was the ultimate expression of human ingenuity. The car is among the pantheon of the gods of the United States, along with money, guns and short form video content. Long live the American automobile!
The wavey film footage clicks, the image is still, lines of static appear along the top of the frame. The vintage film was being projected at a Drive-Thru Multiplex Cinema, though for some reason the projectionist had simulated as if the film was from an 80s Betamax by editing it in Adobe After Effects, although the film was more stylistically similar to the futurism of the 1950s. Was the projectionist smoking crack?
"Hey man, that's an anachronism! What gives?" I yell from the open door of my Hyundai. I try to leave the outdoor cinema, but reverse into the car behind me so that the driver starts beeping and yelling. I wave at them, then drive the car forward and into the back of another car. Its alarm starts going off as I keep driving the car back and forth and bumping into the cars around me. Somebody knocks on my window.
"It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something." They say.
"Okay." I say, shrugging. "Is that J. G. Ballard?"
"Its the opening lines to one of my favourite video essays."
"Try reading a book once in a while, you might learn something. Fucking dork." I say, ramming the car into the one in front of me again. I begin shouting, rocking back and forth in the drivers seat, trying to push the car by pressing the accelerator all the way down so that the tyres start spinning and smoking and I’m shouting until I can’t breathe. I reach around into the backseat, finding a small cannister of gas with a mask attached, pressing it onto my face and taking some deep breaths. I had to calm down. Was I experiencing road roid rage? Or had I spent too much time in the Hyundai Sonata? I hit the open road to find out.
I’m speeding. I’m undertaking, accelerating between gaps, into incoming traffic, crushing signs and other bullshit beneath my wheels. Ever since the United States had removed the speed limit on the highway, the average driving experience between cities passed by quickly. It seemed a lot of other drivers hadn't quite caught on yet, instead honking their horns at me like they were mindless geese, but I knew the law. I kept flipping people off, shouting at them from inside my car. It was a shame the windows didn't roll down, as I'd be spitting on their cars as I drove past. I truly began to feel like I was one of the locals, honouring their regional customs and trying my best to not look like a tourist. And I think I was pulling it off. I drive the car diagonally across six lanes of traffic and cut in line at a drive-thru.
I was at Inside & Out Diner: The Burger King of McDonald. They specialised in inverted fast food, which I paid for with Klarna from my shitcoin wallet. One of the gimmicks of the franchise was that all the staff spoke backwards, though due to this training being delivered in microtransactions, the staff group had split between two ideologies. One thought that speaking backwards meant every letter would be rearranged back to front, so "Welcome to Inside Out." would become "Tuo edisni ot emoclew." These were known as orthodox backwarders. The other system was more simpler, simply rearranging the words back to front "Out inside to welcome." would be how the Reform backwarders operated. Unfortunately, I was met with an Orthodox backwarder on the intercom.
"Esaelp redro ruoy ekat I nac?”
"Huh?" I yelled, lighting a cigarette.
"Esaelp redro ruoy ekat I nac?”
"Gimme the classic Stacker with an extra portion of
burgers." I say from behind the glass.
I then drive as fast as I can to the order window, get my phone out and start filming myself having a tantrum.
"What the fuck, I just ordered my food and it’s not been cut up and fed to me. What the actual fuck is going on?" I start shouting. I then flip the phone round and start filming the staff.
"Have you seen this shit? I'm being deadass right now. Get me my fucking food! I want my food!" I keep yelling. The food arrives, I have to open my door to collect it, then I speed away, nearly hitting a family of children leaving the diner as simple pedestrians. I park up in the car lot and look at the sorry excuse for a meal. The burger is a piece of bread sandwiched between two pieces of beef. The fries are sticks of salt with crushed up potato starch sprinkled over the top. The drink is mostly coke with just a single ice cube in it. I eat thousands of calories, chainsmoke cigarettes and listening to the radio turned up so loud its just a mechanical roar. Afterwards I sit amongst the detritus of greasy paper, trying to meditate but was unable to centre myself for some reason. There was something on my mind that made it hard to focus. I slide the car seat backwards, running over a burger I had dropped earlier so that it squirts in two, interior roadkill diagrams. I watch street fight videos on my phone and drift off to a dreamless sleep.
I wake hours later. It was night time, I was a few miles west
of Jacksonville. I drove along the empty road and a car approaches me. The
headlights were too bright. I held my hand up to try and block it, but the
light was so bright I could see it glow through my hand. Thousands of megawatts
were being pumped into the road like a flood of candlelight. I pulled a laser
pen from my top pocket and started shining it in the other drivers eyes,
though it seemed to have no effect. Thats when I realised the driver was dead.
His car autonomously drove itself across Florida, pulling itself up into
electric vehicle recharging stations, self-driving itself like a hearse through
endless rush hour traffic, lonely nights speeding across the interstate as
crickets and frogs sang in the background. Judging by the decomposition of the
driver, it had been doing this for several months, if not years. As our cars
passed each other, I could swear that the driver turned to look at me. In the
backseat was Armitage Shanks. I gagged in fear, almost crashing the car against
the rail separating the roads. I came to a stop, skidding and turning 180
degrees and burst into tears.
