I am the apparatus

I am an extension of the apparatus. I am its business end, its interface, its worn, sometimes warm, sometimes wet functional protuberance. I am where the proverbial rubber of the apparatus' ideology meets the functional road of the masses. I am its mover. I am its shaker. I am its giver and its taker. My body gives it life. My behavior gives it substance. My pain gives it conviction. My screams give it voice. My death gives it immorality. It can be a flag but its meaning, its symbolism, its utter significance for every teary eyed follower is written in my blood, which I willing gave to close the circular argument in which it caught me. It moved me. I move into the path of destruction for the sake of it. My body is memorialized in it. It flaps in the breeze. That's my spirit haunting it.

I am a the moral significance of the machine. I operate it. It moves me. I move it. I feed it my time, my money, my gas. And it provides me a projection upon which the most whimsical of fantasies take shape. Conquering the space and time between point A and point B is not travel. No sir. That's freedom. I will protect it with my life for it is an extension of my citizenship in a free country. It is my badge of privilege. It is my extensible reality. It is my best side. I move forth in the world showing it. If I dent it, it becomes my shame. I paint my politics on it in so many adhesive messages. This machine allows me a public space for my own personal graffiti, and so I project. I tell the world that I'm proudly atheist. I tell the world to be forewarned that I'm, in fact, transporting precious cargo, my child. I proclaim to the world that my choice of brand is as important as my choice of political party. I let the world know that this machine is, in fact, one of many that I own. Yes, through this machine I present to you my fitness as a mate, my fitness as a citizen, my role as a member in our society. I am free in this machine, yet every turn I take requires close observance to speed limits, lights that indicate when I must stop, and directions that indicate where I must go. Where am I going? Why is it so far away? A conspiracy emerges, but the conspiracy is deep structure to a cleavage that I chose upon participating in the world that was made for and justifies the use of these machines. They are articulations, sentences, functions, a grammar of functionality through which I speak freedom, I speak common sense, I affirm the reality of the society that this car underpins and makes sensible and common. I am complicit in it by recognizing it as a reality to which I must contend.

"That man ain't right in the head." My step father used to say. He was commenting on a man who lived in a motel and who walked everywhere he needed to go. He was a university professor who had sworn off the niceties. He was a man perhaps with a phobia of automobiles. He was a man who had lost his wife in an automobile-related accident. None can fault him for his reaction. He had to do it to not forget his wife. Yet others, on the inside of their cars looking out upon him, couldn't help but notice that unlike us in our cars, he was no longer anonymous. He wasn't hiding behind the tint of windows or shade. He wasn't hiding behind a half ton of metal carefully designed and marketed to my demographic. No, he was using his own two feet, strapped into sandals, to go to an fro like a Jesus or a Gandhi. but he was just that loony fixture in that small town where he walked. "It's best to remain anonymous," seemed to be one of the messages that car ownership provides. No longer a Jesus or a Gandhi, this man walked the town, his message warped by the sensibilities in the ultraviolet filter of car windshields that passed him by. Each framed the faces that peered out while they framed the light of the world that came within. A strange moving world picture, and we continually find ways to affix a screen to our apparatus for the sake of being its audience.

Why are we afraid to be close, to confront, to put up with relative strangers? We are all human are we not? Why do we love the image projected from a satellite in space of an actor who plays a person that he or she is not while we live mere feet from people from whom we are worlds apart? I stand, sit, sleep, eat, shit, cry, masturbate, dream, fantasize, scream, fight, write, and moan alone a mere 20 to 30 feet from people I hardly know. I am white. They are black. I am alone. They have each other. We are human yet our ideas, our sensibilities, our values can be so far apart due to the choices we made, the actions we chose, the lives we chose to lead. Yet we still eat, sleep, shit, cry, piss, die mere feet from each other. Concrete and brick are all it takes to erect a psychic barrier between ourselves. Our music choices, our television viewing habits, our eating habits all help define our lifestyle and our identity yet we don't share this with each other. Even the windows the provide light to come in are blocked up to disallow the bored or curious neighbor from peering in. And so we remain in our homes. They are our boxes, our velvet-lined cases, where we store our personal menagerie of me-things. An "I" that lives separately from my body resides there. Fire, floods, and burglary remind us of this. We continue to invest in the object qua fetish. We collect some mindlessly while most collect dust.