Any car at all.
I bought a new car once when I was young and foolish and poisoned by newly experienced testosterone floods. I won't do that again. I deeply resent how so-called adults in this society, those who do not live in urban areas with good public transportation, are expected to own and drive automobiles lest they be considered not fully functional human beings.
Not once in my life have I considered driving a car to be a valid "rite of passage" or privilege of adulthood. I'm a licensed driver and have been since I was sixteen but I don't usually carry my license with me. I've only been in one accident, when I was nineteen. It hurt bad, it was expensive, but I was insured and fully recovered.
As an eccentric mostly harmless white guy I can get away with challenging "papers please" fascism. I know my driver's license number, my car insurance card is in my glove box, and the picture downloaded onto any modern patrol car's computer looks like me and matches the name and address on the insurance card.
The thirty year old piece of shit car I drive is a form of protest. I mock the shiny new Lexus or Mercedes. The only thing I wash and polish on the outside of my car are the windows and mirrors. My car has lichen growing on it, like a rock in the wilderness, or the tiles on the roof of my house..
This Thanksgiving I drove hundreds of miles to my brother's house for the holiday, and then Saturday to the memorial service of a childhood friend. It would have been a much nicer visit for me if I'd been able to sleep on a train, especially for the trip back. I was burned out on life but not quite a danger to myself or others on the highway, well more functional than drunk/distracted-by-smart-phone/sleepy/horny/blasting-heavy-metal/little-kids-screaming/air-conditioning-on-high-in-my-face/distracted-by-work-stress levels of typical automobile driver irresponsibility.
But I was still hurting, relying on pain and my fuck-it-all mental state of mind to keep me driving home in 100% plus driver awareness. I even saw a bald eagle on an insulated-top-wire power pole in San Ardo. That was cool. That's why the insulation is on that line, for the eagles and the condors. In the bad old days bald or golden eagles and California condors would spread their wings and be electrocuted. Good people fixed that.
But when I got home, safe from automobile driver danger, I got really, really, angry. My childhood friend, not in an entirely direct way, was killed by our automobile culture. He was severely injured in a transportation industry accident directly related to our automobile culture. He was something of a wizard with coastal construction, often highway construction, on sand and other unstable ground. As a consequence of the accident his driving skills were impaired . Later he wrecked his personal automobile and lost his ability to drive and driver's license entirely. From there it was a downhill spiral of angry self-isolation, pain-killers, and alcohol.
For any number of reasons, from the perspective of individual humans to the entire earth's natural environment, the automobile culture needs to die. We humans can kill it (with extreme prejudice) or wait for Mother Nature to do it by far uglier means.
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