life? a highway

hi everyone i'm back after like 2 weeks out on the open road and i have some thoughts. somewhere in virginia on the final stretch of our drive from new orleans to philadelphia, we were listening to lucinda williams' happy woman blues (my guiding light in life pretty much) and joni said, "if you hate this album, you don't respect women," and i think there's a lot of truth to that. when i think about being a woman, i often think about running away. or to put it more empowering-ly, the relentless pursuit of freedom and solitude, which i have mostly sought on i-95.

at my worst in high school, i would listen to tavi gevinson's 8tracks playlists and sit in my closet and read jack kerouac (i wish i was kidding!!) and dream of being a fuckin oogle. luckily i never had to resort to that, but as i have gotten older i've become pretty flighty by other means. i've always been terrible at being alone, but during the year after i left college i lived in a group house in atlanta and had a boyfriend who never left me alone. the only time i had alone was when i was able to extract myself and drive away, usually to asheville, where i would spend a lot of time alone on the blue ridge parkway and try to push myself out of the delirious fog i felt encased in 99% of the time. my journal entries from some of these drives are... bleak. but it felt good to run away, even figuratively, and usually just the knowledge that i could do that at any point kept me afloat.

there's definitely a media trope of women seeking freedom on the open road - when and why this started i have no idea but i think it really picked up speed in the early nineties - and, if i'm being honest, my pursuits of the american highway system have all been because of, and not in spite of, said tropes. i'm thinking of crossroads, of course, and thelma & louise, and cowgirls get the blues, plus that scene in practical magic where nicole kidman is driving through the greenscreened desert while joni mitchell's 'case of you' played. and then there's basically every album made by lucinda williams, the dixie chicks, and joni mitchell.

actually, more than any of these key moments in cinematic feminism, i believe what started me on this path was the 2006 movie "cars." specifically, this scene:



if you know me, you know that i am generally pretty anti-disneypixar. maybe i'm no fun, but i find it extremely distasteful for adults to go around saying, always with a cheeky smirk, that their favorite movie is lion king. or worse, frozen. like, no it's not!! unfortunately i encounter way too many of these people (probably a quaker circles thing) and i'm always tempted to respond by telling them my favorite movie is dogtooth, or salò, but i'm not a dick. anywayyyy. "cars" is different for me - maybe it's the simplicity of narrative, the distinct lack of total corniness with which the moral (because there's always a moral) is delivered, maybe it's the virility of these cocksure, horny cars?? 

last spring i decided to drive from philadelphia to tucson by myself, which was kind of stupid and made me go a little insane and convince myself i was gonna die alone in a walmart parking lot somewhere around oklahoma city, but at my best moments i felt just like lightning mcqueen.