Vehicular Manslaughter

Last night I almost murdered somebody. A young woman. It was dark, and I was not in full control of my actions.

I'd pulled up to the T intersection that feeds out from the parking structure back onto the street. I looked both ways--I swore I did--and saw nothing coming from the street and no pedestrians. I took my foot off the brake and let my car start to roll forward in anticipation of turning right on the red light. I looked ahead, and there was a young woman smack in front of my Explorer. I'd not seen her before, even though I'm sure I'd looked to my right (hadn't I?), but perhaps I'd not seen her because she'd been concealed by the pole supporting the traffic light or because she was wearing dark clothing and it was late at night and the lighting was poor at that intersection. I saw her turn to me, though, cuing in on the motion, and immediately tried to step on the brake. In my rush, the tip of my foot somehow got wedged underneath the brake pedal. I tried to pull my foot out, but it only shoved up against the underside of the brake. The car continued to roll forward. The woman was looking at me with an expression of horror and anger. The front of the car was only a few feet away from her and closing. I managed to extricate my foot and pushed down on the top of the brake pedal, stopping the car. She walked on, looking at me with complete contempt. I threw up my hands in a gesture of helpless apology. The whole incident had transpired in the course of maybe one or two seconds. I'd been possibly half a second away from mowing her down.

Now, the look she gave me was one of disgust and contempt. I know the look well; I've given it to any number of drivers in my time who didn't respect my right of way and didn't allow for the scant few seconds required for me to pass unhit in front of their anxious grilles. She saw a driver being careless and threatening her life, and she hated that driver. Does it matter that, during the whole exchange, I was desperately trying to stop my car and so not injure her? Not to her mind; she can't know that I was aware of her and doing my best to not hurt her, all she can know is that I very nearly struck her down. When she relates the experience to her friends, it will be of her walking innocent across the street with the right of way and some evil asshole of a driver almost killing her. If I'd been about half a second slower and had struck her, would it have mattered, in a legal context, that I'd been trying to stop? No; there would be the fact of one person getting hurt or killed, and the criminal repercussions to follow. I was half a second away from being a murderer. Would it have mattered, in a personal identity context, that I'd been trying to stop? No; I would have struck her down, and this act would have become the defining action of my life, and I would have spent a significant portion of the rest of my life paying for it either with jail time or trying to make remunerations that I know I never could make, and my consciousness of inflicting a horrible injury or death on another person would come to dominate my consciousness, and I'd feel that no helpful or kind action I could ever take would overrule or override that one heinous one, and if I didn't destroy myself out of guilt I'd spend the rest of my life trying to make reparations that I could never make, because I'd never be able to undo the death or injury.

Half a second away. Half a second away from all of this. Even though I was trying to stop it. Even though I would never deliberately hurt another person like that. I was half a second away from ruining somebody's life or killing somebody and most likely ruining my own. Any other aspects of character or mind I might have possessed--my writing, my desire to be ethical, my sense of humor, even, if not my life itself--would have been sacrificed on a fire of guilt.

But the fact of the matter is that we are only ever a second or three away from killing somebody when operating a car. Close your eyes for one second while driving at freeway speeds with vehicles drifting on either side of you, let the car drift in accordance with its poor alignment for one second, hesitate for one second in the decision as to whether or not it is necessary to brake, look to the left and not see the pedestrian who materializes out of the darkness to your right, and bam, you are a murderer. You've allowed a ton of metal and plastic operating at high speed to crush the life out of yourself or another human being. The opportunities to make such a mistake are manifold, even if you are careful. Even if you are careful, you are liable to make such a mistake over the course of your career as a driver of a motor vehicle, just because there are so many little things that can go wrong and eventually one of them will.

In any other context, this capacity for casual murder would be entirely untenable. Imagine a society where everybody is walking around all the time with a loaded shotgun. And we'll assume that most of these people have some baseline competency in operating a shotgun, at least enough to receive an operating permit (read "driver's license"), though many of these people nevertheless will not. And just having this permit or having a constant familiarity with this shotgun will nevertheless result in a wide array of behaviors with respect to this shotgun, some more responsible and some more risky. And even then, due to inexperience or carelessness brought on by years of repetitive habit, it is entirely possible that a person will forget to put the safety on his shotgun, and a slight toggle of the trigger could set it off, and maybe that just results in a bunch of buckshot lodged in the wall or maybe it vaporizes somebody's head. Alternately, imagine a society in which pedestrians walk down the street clad in clothing that is covered in an array of blades, spear points and sword points, and the slightest stumble could set two of these pedestrians impaled upon each other.

(I guess such the gun scenario would actually be relatively true if you lived in Texas. Why anybody would want to live like that I don't really know. The spikes would be true in Sigil and that, gentle reader, is why Sigil is better off as a fantastic place than a real one. Like Texas.).

Driving is a fucking death game. Even if you're sober, which many people are not. Even if you try to be cautious and aware, which many people do not, and which behavior the repetitiveness and mechanical monotony of driving inhibits.

Is this right? I don't know that this is such a good setup, imbuing so many people with the power and responsibility over death, tested daily, where the failure of a moment can result in severe property damage, injury, or death for oneself and others. I am aware of this terrible power, and most of the time I say I do not want it. But I've come to a point in my life where I cannot now live without it.

I lived without it for a very long time. Twenty-six years, in fact; I didn't start driving a car until I was about twenty-six years old, although I got my license at eighteen and only put it into effect for its primary purpose one time in those intervening eight years. Part of this was due to the fact with the piddly-shit income I made up unto that point in my life that I'd never be able to afford to purchase a car, much less pay to fuel and maintain and insure one, unless I wanted to give over about half of my net income as a minimum wage slave to do so. And I resented the notion of having to pay about half of my income just for the sake of being able to get to and from my place of work, which is primarily what I would have done with a car. But at least as much of my lack of motorized mobility was due to the fact that this responsibility over death scared the god-damned fucking shit out of me.

I lived without a car in spite of the fact that the city where I lived, Irvine, presumes a car. The housing tracts are large and unbroken. When the city was conceived, walking must have been thought of as a source of recreation rather than a serious way of getting from point A to point B. To move out from my house at the center of the housing tract to the goods and services beyond was a trip of thirty minutes each way, at the very least; and that presumes that I was walking to the very nearest shopping center. If I wanted to so much as go out and buy a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of diet coke it was a trip that I'd have to plan my entire afternoon around. And then there was going beyond that point. Getting to work on the Irvine-Tustin border meant a walk of two and a half solid hours, or else a one and one half hour walk up to Jamboree and a fifteen minute wait for the bus and the payment of a dollar fifty for the privilege of taking a bus for another fifteen minutes over a stretch of road with no sidewalk where I could not walk (though I tried once, on my first day before I realized this, with the cars rushing by half a foot away from me) only to arrive at my crappy job; it meant that if it meant that I didn't bum a ride from a co-worker or a parent, which I most often did. Going to school at IVC was a commute of several miles and an hour and a half either way, and it was a long several miles in the hundred-degree heat of summer that wrung sweat out of my body until my clothes, when they dried, were caked with dried salt or else in rains so thick that my pants would get soaked and the detergent would come up of my jeans and get worked into a froth by the action of my one leg rubbing against the other. There was another bus that ran to IVC, but walking to the bus stop would've taken forty-five minutes and then there would have been more waiting and the payment and so it wouldn't hardly have been worth it.

I realize that when I did get a ride with somebody else, I was just outsourcing my own dread of the responsibility of driving to another person, although others never seemed to experience it as acutely as I did. And do.

But the greatest moral quandaries I ever got into as a pedestrian were when I heard the crush of a snail's shell beneath my foot--I always tried to step around them, I felt no need to end a life, even a snail's life, if I didn't have to--or when I would say hello to another pedestrian and he would only stare back at me as if I had said something offensive or when somebody would cross to the other side of the street so that she wouldn't have to walk near me in all of my hulking long-haired freakishness. Never was anybody's life on the line. I know I am a massive beast, but my ability to accelerate that mass into motion was limited without mechanical aid and so the overall force attendant on my person was always pretty low (scaled to human, rather than arthropod or annelid or gastropod, size), and I trusted my reaction time and my muscular responsiveness, unfiltered and uninterfaced through any mechanical impedimenta, to stop me in my walking before I crashed into somebody. I was a risk to snails and ants and lost earthworms, and believe me after killing dozens of such beings entirely incidentally it did play on my conscience, but I was no real risk to any other human, in spite of what the women who were terrified of my appearance might have thought.

(I suppose everybody who has ever walked anywhere has engaged in such small acts or murder incidental to his purpose. Walking in grass, it would be easy not to notice. Paved sidewalk, though, is like a canvas for the spatter of small-scale murder. Your crush a snail under your heel and you see the green of its gore sprayed out over the sidewalk, and you come back the same day the same way or even the next day and the selfsame corpse is still there, perhaps now with ants scavenging its guts and perhaps you end up stepping on those, too, although you think that most of them will fall between the ridges on the bottom of your shoe but you know that some of them will not.).

And my God, was it a chore sometimes, in the heat or the rain or when running a fever. It was a chore, too, to buy food for myself and then have to haul it back over two or three miles. Buy something so simple as a six pack of beer and it gets pretty damn heavy after the first five minutes or so. Your arm carrying the bag gets to aching, and you switch your package off from arm to arm but it's still painful and burdensome. Walking out to eat and coming back I would almost invariably get heat sick and diarrhetic by the time I got back. There were a lot of frantic clenched-cheek fast walks across the last few blocks back to home, and I hope you won't think less of me, gentle reader, if I were to tell you that your humble narrator didn't always make it in time, in spite of his best efforts.

(There were, of course, no public restroom facilities in that sprawl of private housing. Even if I could find a restroom in a public park, it was almost invariably locked. Let me tell you, gentle reader, that there are few things more distressing than knowing that you are half an hour out from a bathroom with absolutely no way to get closer other than to walk, which churns your bowels or your bladder up all the more. I was often tempted to knock on a nearby house's door and ask, as politely as I could, if I might use the bathroom and state that I would not impose if there were not a dire need, but in my mental extrapolations of this scenario there was no request, however kindly delivered, that produced the desired result. Many's the time when I was nearly seduced into the evil of going behind a bush in the landscaping, but I never did, gentle reader, I never did. I walked that line, and I walked it hard.).

But now I drive a car, and so that life of being at the mercy of distance is behind me. A trip that used to be an insurmountable obstacle, or else was a two-hour haul that was sufficient for me to make the comparison within my own mind of my own journey walking along a paved sidewalk in a suburb to the treks of epic heroes--Hey, take two hours in which you have no technology and no incessant demands of new stimuli to keep you from thinking and see how much of an inflated opinion *you* get of your own efforts--is now an eight minute drive. A chore, to be sure, especially when one has to get dressed and put one's shoes on for the occasion, but a chore, and not a true happening. Two hours of walking used to take me to the store and back, a journey of about six miles. Two hours of driving takes me now from central Orange County to eastern San Diego, a journey of about ninety miles.

And in driving a car, I see how perverse it is, how truly perverse and subversive, to walk. Everything in my home town, from the circuitous streets to the great tracts of houses, was designed around the presumption of people having cars, and wanting to walk only for recreation rather than having to walk out of necessity. Nobody intended for me to use the sidewalks in the way that I did. If everybody in Irvine had to walk for an hour to buy groceries and then bought only what he or she could comfortably carry, the city would shut down. If everybody in the city had to take the bus, walking to the infrequently-spaced bus stops that stay superficial, street-wise, and don't even penetrate into the core of most of the residential developments (because what good suburbanite wants to see poor people taking the bus and have to deal with that noise and diesel smell?), and then waiting fifteen minutes or half an hour or forty-five minutes for the infrequently-spaced buses to arrive but God knows you need to get there early because you sure as Hell don't want to be late, the city would shut down. On the street level, on the literal level of its streets, Irvine resents pedestrians. It resents poor people who have no engines but their own bodies to propel them across distances. And as much as I resent that resentment, there's no way, now that I have a car, that I would want to go back to being one of the resented, before whom all the city is arrayed as a punishment of distance and time and physical wear.

Yes, I do appreciate the lack of density and congestion that are attendant upon suburban sprawl, which I recognize as being the point of it all. I appreciate the increased amount of green space and landscaping. I'm not numb to these things. I couldn't be, having had such values inculcated in me by the buildings and by the streets themselves for so many years of my life, and also by the persons who would choose to live in such a community.

From aesthetics to perceptions of necessity, though. Given the way cities are constructed now, it seems to be necessary for a person who doesn't want to give over hours of his ever day to transportation (and the hectic demands of contemporary living make it necessary that we do no such thing) to drive. And on the one hand, this is fucked up. Because nothing that is technologically intensive and resource intensive and prohibitively expensive and carries such serious risks and responsibilities as driving *ought* to be necessary. On the other hand, how could we do without it? Operating without a car within cities that are designed to accommodate the needs of cars rather than people is brutal. As technology increases, so too does the expectation of intensity, of being able to get what one wants even if what one wants is fifty miles distant, or being able to maintain relationships or careers even if the persons and places involved are separated by distances that would be impossible without technological assistance. I don't know too many people who would be content only with experiencing what- and whomsoever is within walking distance; I know I wouldn't. Footbound as I was for so freakishly long, I wouldn't want to go back to it. On a social level, we cannot go back to that. The small community model is alright for some things, but it could not sustain the informationally-dense, highly complex and technical and global culture that we have come to expect (and that people partake of even in small communities, such as small mountain towns, in spite of their complaints about urbanization or corporatization or globalization). And that kind of culture is only possible with cars. Or it could be possible without cars, if we were to re-conceptualize our lives and our expectations of intensity such that a two-hour commute would be acceptable, or if we were to tear up our Southern California cities and re-construct them with the aim of having reasonable facilities within walking distance of residences at the probable costs of congestion and density. And everybody would have to live very proximal to his place of work, so given the frequent job changes that people undergo these days people would have to move every year or three to a neighborhood where housing values or crime rates might be entirely different from his previous expectations. And I would have to live next to SDSU, where every night there would be sorority girls attired only in lingere parading down the street near my window and the attendant shouts of drunken frat boys, all through the night. Yeah. Fuck that. Or I guess we could effect a mass exodus of car-centric Southern California and all go live in San Francisco or Portland or New York, where neighborhoods are designed without the expectation of driving and there are corner stores and public transportation or even walking from place to place aren't only for the utterly disenfranchised or the insane.

(Or we could develop teleportation technology. Gentle reader, there are few things I would like more in this world than for human beings to develop teleportation technology. I'd even settle for a magical flue teleportation network or the ability to apparate. I fantasize about it frequently, this magical technology that would enable us to move freely from place to place, but remove the terrible burden of potentially lethal operator error from everyone who gets behind the wheel of a car. Mr. Scott can take on that responsibility all for himself; I don't want it, and he usually does a good job with it, except in the first *original* _Star Trek_ movie that everybody seems to have forgotten now and I understand that because the script and direction are pretty abstruse and consequently kind of do suck and are unfun but the visuals are nevertheless pretty cool and worth watching. But I guess teleportation could go the other way and we'd all get our DNA fused with flies, which would be kind of shitty, except we could vomit all over each other and dissolve each other and slurp up the soupy mess of vomitus and enzymed flesh, and that would suck but also be pretty awesome).

But cars, man. Cars. We have become dependent upon what began as a luxury such that it is now a necessity. It's another one of those things, like eating large quantities of meat or having a household filled with cheap consumer goods manufactured in China, that is a relatively recent habit that would be alien even to our own ancestors four generations back in this country to say nothing of the many billions of people in this world even now who manage to get by from day to day without such things.

Do I want to hang up my keys such that I will never accidentally imperil another person's life ever again? Yes. I do. Absolutely. Do I want to go back to devoting an hour and a half to a five mile commute? Do I want to not be able to see my girlfriend on the weekends because she live in Orange County and I live in San Diego? No. Not at all. And when I think about the consequences of failure when driving, which are severe, my attachment to driving for the facilitating of my own schedule seems all the more self-indulgent. But unlike smoking, which is an addiction that only ever did harm to my own self, this is an addiction to a luxury drug that I don't know how to break. And unlike smoking, which is an ever more difficult habit to indulge, this is an addiction in which the entire world around you is literally engineered against the possibility of you breaking this habit.

So I'll get back in my car and drive to work again today, knowing full well that murder is a moment away. The Rolling Stones say it's just a shot away; it's far less than that. It's one foot stuck underneath the brake pedal away, a mechanical failure away, as little as a blink away. Pulling a trigger is a pretty intentional and deliberate act. If only all murder required such intention. Vehicular murder is a mere unintention away.

Hey hey.