LUDIC LOG

When one is confronted (and one often is) with a particularly gross or malignant specimen of reckless driving on the Phoenix streets, a quick scan is made of the bad side of the brain to locate a proper epithet with which to tar the offending operator. While one cannot discount well-worn favorites like "fuckhead", "bastard", and "motherfucker", the perennial contender "asshole", and the genteel and inchoate "you son of a...", no doubt the eternal champion is "crazy", as in "that guy's crazy!"

A comforting canard, this; it first detracts the blame of a poor judgement away from one's self and on to a mysterious 'other', then establishes, with always-too-hasty fervor, that the person in question must be on the verge of total mental collapse to have made such a monumental vehicular faux-pas --- "Certainly," goes the logic, "I would never have done such a crazy thing." It serves the great role of valorizing the thinker, placing him or her on a lone-wolfish, one-good-cop-in-a-bad-town promontory from where the much-needed righteous indignation can be affected and judgment passed on the vile, half-crazed aliens that make something as simple and necessary as driving a constant trial. And most of all, it is a blunt, a barrier. When you say that another person is crazy, you isolate his activities, place them in the domain of madness, and the implication is that such behavior is atypical, when in fact the truth is much different; by calling them insane you shield yourself from the reality that everyone does the exact same thing.

Driving in Phoenix does, indeed, make you crazy. Driving is a dangerous enough proposition anywhere; there is a certain distant, antisocial mania that grips modern man when he makes congress with any kind of a machine, much less one that weighs a ton and can move at a hundred miles an hour. And the consumerist frenzy that drives the car market has itself birthed some unfortunate psychosexual neuroses. But driving on the streets and freeways of central Arizona drags so many unique disorders and imbalances into the proceedings that it is virtually a case history, a psychogeographical file folder that would provide any young and ambitious psych major with a doctoral thesis to build a career on.

Observe the following subject: a young woman (Caucasian, early twenties, unmarried, no children) is piloting a late-model Japanese subcompact down 24th Street, just northwest of downtown. Take it as a given, for now, that she is in good mental health: we shall learn more of her later, when the opportunity to examine other flaws in her psychological makeup is more leisurely. For now, take her as a test, an object lesson on the unusual stresses operating a car in the Valley of the Sun places on the healthy and the unhealthy alike.

The fact that she is driving at all is evidence of denial: she can ill afford the drain on her paltry income caused by the car, its exorbitant insurance rate, and its hideously expensive operating costs. Yet and still she drives it, and drives it virtually everywhere she needs to go, thus insuring that its need for repairs will be ever greater. Further evidence of her denial is the fact that while she is an environmentally aware young woman, she has so bonded with the car psychologically that she rationalizes away any pollutants it might produce (something about its being Japanese) to alleviate her sense of guilt.

Normally a passive, nonaggressive person, she manifests a merciless hostility bordering on the psychopathic behind the wheel. Her hatred of any driver who "crosses" her or from whom she perceives a slight is far beyond any hatred she has ever felt relative to the objective size of the pain it causes her. She, like thousands of others, will often risk her life in an attempt to catch up to someone who has offended her driving sensibilities, just to see what they look like. Another car merges ahead of her without signalling; she tallies this activity mentally, numbering it in her mind with a compulsiveness not otherwise seen in other aspects of her life. Normally not given to paranoia of any stripe, she thinks nothing of engaging in wild speculation about what the drivers near her may be planning in the immediate future, how this might affect her own automotive activities, and whether or not it would be wise of them to carry out these almost certainly noxious deeds considering the poor quality of the day she has already had. While not diagnosable as schizophrenic or hebephrenic, she constantly talks while in the driver's seat: to herself, the car radio, the other drivers, and even to her car and the cars of those around her (although she has not gone so far as to name her vehicle, a seemingly gender-restricted affectation). She is not, like many other drivers, given to vivid fantasies of equipping her car with destructive weapons systems and utilizing them on offending "enemy" cars; she does, however, infrequently take to suicidal reveries in which she envisions pressing her foot to the floor and plowing into the rear of another car, her last sight on earth being the look of shock and terror on the faces of the foes that occupy her target vehicle.

When driving, she, as well as almost all vehicle operators, becomes a shaky mass of paranoia, schizophrenia, sociopathology, rationalization, hallucinatory detachment, obsessive-compulsive mania, and hair-trigger neurosis; she and these other madwomen and madmen form a mobile nation of the insane, creating a culture of insanity the population of which is amorphous and unquantifiable. They drive, and in driving, they change; for at least a half an hour each day, the young woman becomes one of a terrifying mob of lunatics with nothing but mechanical habit guiding their morals and with tons of motorized momentum at their fingertips. It is a constantly moving kingdom, the realm of a mad king and a faceless and distant queen and a transient and disaffected populace; a morass of men and women that everyone feels the need to be a part of but that everyone wants to escape once they are. It is the land of speed and direction, of time and destination, of a people who know only blind, selfish acceleration and who obey no decrees but the ill-defined and arbitrary Rules of the Road and the cold, unchanging laws of physics. It is an explosion of selfish drive, a protean dystopia where everyone comes to visit, but few choose to stay.

She pulls off the main road; she wends her way down the side streets; she negotiates the parking lot. She steps from the car, and she is sane again.