In the summer before my senior year of high school, I did not know how to drive. The plan for that summer was to spend time with my family in Southern California, a place where care are necessary and the thought of a sixteen-year-old without a driver’s license was anathema. But at the time, I didn’t need a license. I lived in Montgomery County, public transportation mecca of the DC Metro area, where busses were plentiful and people thought differently about driving.

Except that I was also more than a little intimidated at the idea of being forced to pilot a machine that could easily kill people if I was more than a little inattentive. My sixteen-year-old brain was not prepared to accept that level of responsibility. (In some ways, I am still unprepared.)

I did not get my license that summer, but a week before I left, my cousin (who is roughly the same age I am) was in a crash that left him comatose, with fairly severe brain damage.

Immature little shit that I was, I remember being peeved that my mother – who had not seen me for two months – asked about him first when I got off the plane.

I actually got my license when I was nineteen, the summer I worked at a boat yard in New York. That was also the summer that I learned how to drive a forklift and I put one of the golf carts into the water when I didn’t give myself enough stopping distance on a shallow hill.

These days, I work for the Department of Transportation doing technical support for the data entry system that collects all of the traffic fatality information from across the country. It is a sobering thought, when I consider it; the numbers represent individual deaths, but to me, they are mere data.

Still I am cognizant of what I do and try to pay attention when I drive, because I do not want to put any numbers into the database through my actions. That would be inappropriate irony, as far as I’m concerned. And I am concerned.

The other night, we changed the cds in my car and Shannon took advantage of the fact that the trunk was open to fondle me. Unfortunately, my attention was so focused on her that I almost hit a couple while I was pulling out of my parking space. The man was so angry that he hit the spoiler of my car.

Before we left the apartment that night, I put our copy of J. G. Ballard’s Crash in my bag and forgot about it. The next day, I pulled it out and, as I began to read it, the utter inappropriateness of the situation reared up and smacked me in the face.

(For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, Crash is about the intersection of eroticism and car crashes. In fact, it is an in-depth description of how crashes can be fetishized.)

Granted, I have not yet finished the book, but I am struck by the skill of the author and how well he conjures images that do not seem to go together. It is, in some perverse way, like watching a car crash.

And I don’t know what to think about that.

(Added later:)

Reading further, though, I am beginning to understand the powerful attraction of sexuality, of lust, of pure animal magnetism. How it can warp rational thought into something completely other.

It is ironic that I never really thought to pay attention to this aspect of sexuality before – perhaps because I never had to stare it in the face as much as I have recently. In some strange, significant way, Crash has pointed out the intersection of sexuality and propriety, where the boundaries of one begin to be erased by the presence of the other.

There is still much that I don’t understand – nor do I pretend to – but it is enough (for now) that I am cognizant of the mysteries of these borderlands.

For now, I am content to study these mysteries from afar. I do not know if I may ever be prepared to step forward and allow my primal sexual fantasies to transform my reality for me. It’s an important question, but one that I am content to ponder in theory.