RAW CHINESE

I pulled up to the stop light and looked down into the car next to me. There was a small Chinese girl sitting there with her mouth hanging open, staring off into nothing, and running her hands over her shoulders which were covered with a thick, brilliant white, furry coat. She was very attractive which was surprising to me since I generally was not attracted to Asian women. I could not figure out why she was so fetching and I was really transfixed. So transfixed that I didn’t notice when the dude who was driving the car with the Chinese girl in it got out and came around to my truck. He was not Asian but plain white and very thick around the crucial fighting points, i.e. the arms, legs, and neck. He had a shaved head and was wearing a big shiny metal watch. Just about when he got to my door the light turned green so I drove away waving down at the girl as I passed her. The dude ran back to his car, jumped in, and took off after me. His car was one of those things they call a tuner which I guess is the contemporary version of a hot rod. It had a high pitched little engine that screamed through the gears as it came after me. I kept going down the highway in my old truck which had a giant gas hog V8 in it. It had a lot of power but it was very socially crippled because of its hydrocarbon consumption. I liked it for the simple reason that it separated me from the contemporary man. It helped let the world know that I was backward and slow and that I liked raw force for the sake of raw force. The dude’s tuner was agile, high tech, fast as hell, and it got great gas milage! The modern man was after me in his tuner which was screaming like a mosquito as it bolted down the lanes.
When he was right on my tail I blasted off my engine and cowled his tuner in a thick black smoke that you could probably feel between your fingers and certainly taste in your mouth. I wasn’t worried about what the Chinese girl thought about it because I figured she wouldn’t understand what was happening and at any rate was probably used to thick smoke in her lungs if she was from China. That was another thing about being a slow backward man. I could take one look at someone and make all sorts of judgments. I was happy to do it. Of course I was wrong time after time but who cares? I sure didn’t. I could see the girl in my rearview mirror and her countenance hadn’t changed at all which I found to be very interesting. The guy was making all sorts of faces and punching his fingers away on his smart phone. I wondered if he could be downloading an app which might make his car faster. Or maybe he was downloading a weapon! What if he could download a Taser? I wouldn’t put it past these people today. Their world was to me almost magic. The things they could do! Now I was at another stop light and he pulled up next to me and jumped out of his car again. But the light changed and I drove away right as he got to my door. I waved at the girl again and smiled my best smile. She smiled back! Now I really wanted the dude in the tuner to follow me. I thought that there must be some way for me to get my hands on that Chinese girl. We raced down the main corridor that came into our town from the north and three times in a row stopped at lights where the modern man jumped out of his car to get me and three times in a row I simply drove off before he could. He was chasing me and I was chasing his woman. If he only knew! We came around a long sweeping corner and suddenly I heard a buzzing that sounded like it was on the roof of my car. I stuck my head out the window and looked up to see a drone flying along right over me. That dude had downloaded a drone! Now he came racing up next to me and the Chinese girl’s window came down. “You’ll never get away!” Shouted the dude over the girl’s head. “All I want is the girl!” I replied and then blasted down the gas pedal unleashing another choking cloud of soot and a formidable roar. I had it in my head that my truck might remind the Chinese girl of her home town in China assuming that she lived in a smoky, dirty, industrial hell hole. That’s what I was thinking when suddenly something grabbed my ear. Some part of the drone was holding on to my ear as it flew along right outside my window. Then I felt something being pushed into my ear. “An ear pod!” I thought. And sure enough a voice came through. “I’ve got a photo of you and your filthy truck on Facebook and you’re being shredded as we speak. I’ll have a live feed in another minute!” said the voice. The dude in the tuner had now established communications and I could guess that he had set up a “Pillory Page” for me on Facebook. “Can you hear me?” I asked.
“Yes. And so can the Facebook community.” replied the tuner dude. It was just as I thought. This guy was going to try to kill me using the internet. Our cars were running neck and neck allowing me to look right down at him and the Chinese girl who was now watching me on her phone.
“I only want your woman.” I said. “Also, do you know where I can buy some dirty black oil? I need to burn some more hydrocarbons.”
“Just keep talking.” said the dude.
I looked over and saw that they were on the other side of me now. The tuner was screaming along in first gear and sounded like a dentist’s drill boring through a molar. But he was probably using about a drop of gas per hour whereas I was burning cupfuls per minute. I wanted to tear away from them again but when I stomped down on my gas the engine blew a head gasket. I could tell this because of the squealing sound coming from under the hood and the copious amount of smoke coming out of my tail pipe as oil and water pumped into my cylinders. “Well that engine is gone.” I thought. But since it was still putting out some power I kept going. It looked like my truck was being followed by a oil well fire and my iphone alerted me to the fact that I was being mega-disliked on my Pillory Page. It was notorious but I was pretty excited about being so popular on Facebook. What a feeling! Over two million “dislike” hits and I didn’t have to do a thing! What connections the world could put together! The dislikes were pouring in by the thousands every few seconds. It was so invigorating. I could imagine people wringing their hands as they watched me pollute the air. And the tuner dude thought he was hurting me. He was helping me! I loved it! The rain of dislikes was like being in a refreshing shower, making my blood flow with fervor and my mind race along on endomorphs. It wasn’t that I really liked being a polluter. I mean I cared about the environment. I really did. I not only lived out in the country in my real life but had as a secret wish the desire to live in a simple hut in the woods without electricity or running water. That sounded extremely appealing to me, especially when I was in a giant grocery store or a giant traffic jam. I was one of those people who really didn’t need much or want much. Maybe it was from not wanting much that made me somewhat vigorous when I did want something. The dude driving the tuner had pretty much all I wanted at the moment, namely the Chinese girl. I know it sounds crude and mean to just want some dude’s girlfriend but, believe me, none of them care. We would trade girls like cold germs if we weren’t so bent on fighting over things. I never resisted some other guy’s attempts to steal one of my girlfriends. I always figured it was not up to me or the other dude but up to the girl being stolen. If she wanted to go what was I supposed to do about it? I mean really. I think that attitude came from having had several girlfriends who wanted to test my love for them by having me pummeled in a fight while defending their honor. I didn’t mind defending their honor but I did mind the fact that they had forfeited their honor by their own volition prior to my pummeling. Admittedly, those were girls of yore in the same way that I was not a modern man. Brute force really had a bigger role in past days. And maybe that was something that I missed. The intricate subtleties of contemporary behavior simple choked me down and left me gasping for air. People thought too much. I was too lazy to think. I preferred to misinterpret and then destroy evidence. It made me feel good to do that. I looked down and smiled at the Chinese girl and she saw me smile at her in the phone. She smiled down at her phone and I took a photo of her and posted it on my pillory page so that she could see that I saw her smiling. God damn! The things I didn’t understand! I had long accepted the fact that life transpired through social media. But in the era of energy concerns I couldn’t help but to think that there was something very wasteful about a smile having to be sent back and forth on the electromagnet spectrum, transferred from digits to pixels and God knows what else then back again. At the same time I didn’t want to be a frump about it. This was the way it was and just because I didn’t understand it didn’t make it wrong. In fact, in some strange way, I had to believe that it was right. That little tuner could blow away my truck because of the complicated secrets which resided in black boxes under the hood. My truck worked on the premise of iron and fire which had been around since the Newcomen steam engine which was invented about 1712. Why couldn’t I let go! I loved fire, iron, and smoke! Small, delicate, whispering machines just didn’t move me. And here I was after a Chinese girl who probably hated smoky factories and clanging iron. She probably wasn’t wearing that lush white fur coat for nothing. She couldn’t take her eyes off that phone with its quiet liquid flow of information. I wanted to catch her and force her out into the air. I wanted to roll her and her white coat in the dirt, throw her phone down a sewer, run my fingers through her hair and be a mess. I had thoughts of being raw and fundamental. But I knew I was wrong and for some reason I could feel the perception of my wrongness sapping the life right out of me. There was a reason the world was going the way it was going. The minds were displacing the bodies and the lives which could be lived through the mind were softer and less miserable. I didn’t want to be miserable but I didn’t want to leave my body either. I was one of those people who was simply too lucky and had too much fun with my body. My brutal truck and greasy clothes were vestiges of something I was losing. They were the tiny insignificant things I could control which prevented the past from completely snapping from the present. But it was absurd. And I knew it. I decided that I would go ahead and lose my mind. I stomped down on the accelerator and the grimy mill squeezed out a few more horsepower as I turned into the tuner and tried to run it off the road. Behind us a cloud of black smoke trailed and flattened out on the concrete as cars swerved and danced to their computer programs which were trying to figure out what pollution was. The Chinese girl was staring into her phone with a terrified look on her face and the tuner dude was shaking his fist at me with his giant metal watch bobbing up and down on his wrist. I could see that the watch didn’t have a face, like it was a strange little circle of nothing and I thought that it made sense that a contemporary watch would come right out of the factory without any ability to tell time. I had the tuner wedged up against a guard rail which was sending up blue and green sparks as the paint and galvanized metal burned each other. The Chinese girl held up her phone to the tuner dude’s face and was saying something to him. I imagined her saying, “According to the internet we are being squashed by a truck.” but who knows what she was saying. I could only have wild dreams about what she might be saying. Suddenly the guard rail stopped holding the tuner against my truck and we both went sailing into the air over a ravine. The Chinese girl was screaming and the tuner dude was frantically shifting gears and stomping down his accelerator in an effort to get away from the disaster. Parts were separating from my truck and winging through the air. I did not bother shifting gears or stomping the gas in an effort to get away from the disaster. I still believed in gravity and the doom it held for things flying high. But I admired the tuner dude for thinking that he could out maneuver the world. It really was a good way to be.