voodoo blue and flame metallic

I still need to take proper photos of my new little apartment. but it needs a little more preparation than this thing did to count as photo-ready.

this thing, all "blue flame metallic" and shiny, is my new mode of transportation. it is less than half as old as my old car was when I acquired it five years ago. twelve whole years younger, now. and it runs, which in itself is a vast improvement compared to the status of my car last week. we don't even need to talk about the quality and quantity of paint here or the CD-player to realize I have massively upgraded.

before I trekked over to sign a good chunk of my savings away for this thing, I got to spend nine whole days in a carless (or car-free, depending on which sort of spin we want to put on the situation) cocoon. this wasn't as awful as someone so used to having a car around might expect. there's a sort of herd-immunity-esque entanglement to this modern, connected life I live. even if I ever did decide that from this day forward I would never again set foot in a regular four-wheeled sedan, I don't know that I'd be able to keep such a vow. there is too much that seems to expect and require us to use this mode of moving ourselves and our things around in the world. for nine days I didn't have a car to drive, and for a full seven of that I didn't even own a car at all, having sold the poor, dead thing to a junkyard for $200... but despite my being technically carless, my world was anything but.

so much infrastructure supports this car-full society. I was remembering this quite strange string of moments and thoughts from four years back. but for fossils and asphalt and rubber and traffic laws and assembly lines and departments of motor vehicles... well, everything could be so different. our footprints could be so otherly-shaped. my brain can't shake the shadow of all this privilege that lets me transform my carlessness--a very slight lack of freedom--a very slight inconvenience--into a shiny new(ish) blue Ford Focus within less than one week. one week of carlessness. it seems like nothing (though it isn't, and privilege comes with its own costs).

possibly my longest stretches of carlessness have included time spent in other countries. traveling abroad with a car is not a thing most people even think about doing. as an undergrad I didn't own a car. I let my driver's license expire while I lived in England. who needs to drive at all when you live on a small island with excellent trains?

before I came back from that island (ten years ago! ten!) I spent a long afternoon at a hair salon for the sake of looking a little more cosmopolitan upon my return to the states. it was copper that time. pretty tame, not too garish.

but this time it was blue. just at the ends. nothing too obvious, no, of course not.

and it's so non-obvious in most lights that I'm not even sure it shows up properly at all in most photos.

voodoo blue, they call this color. it is a color of hair dye that most people very happily do without. I could have, too, but maybe this minor, counter-culture-esque fashion choice will somewhat counteract the major, herd-mentality-esque surrender of buying a new car after one mere week without one...