BRIAN LIBBY

Drive My Car

With the right conditions, there are few things I enjoy more than driving. I love piloting my car down straightway and curvy road alike, hearing the low hum of its engine and watching the scenery go by while Shostakovich or the Beatles play on the stereo. But the joy I get from driving only comes a tiny minority of the time. Far more often, I feel like soda pop in a can that’s been shaken, ready to explode.

Wherever I go there is another car in front of me, and in just about every case it’s doing something that gets on my nerves. Usually that means going too slowly, but there is any number of additional frustrations. But my quarrel here is not necessarily with other drivers. I’ve learned that you can’t expect people to drive well. Besides, I prefer to go considerably faster than most, so naturally I’m just asking for a life of frustration on the road stuck behind someone with the audacity to go the speed limit.

In an ideal situation, I’d only drive the car for trips out of town, saving other excursions for mass transit or my own two feet. But it’s all too tempting to get behind the wheel for that quick jaunt to the grocery store. So time after time I put myself in a position to let my short fuse burn.  I’m driving a couple miles to the bank and a slowpoke just barely gets through the yellow light while I have to wait for the red. Or there’s a multi-block traffic jam because a bus is stopping every fifty yards and none of us can get around. I realize this is just par for the course, but somehow I can’t get past this hopelessly naïve, idealistic notion that I’ll be able to freely drive down the road without anything (traffic lights, construction barricades) or anyone (all the other people doing the same thing as me) getting in the way.

Right now Valarie’s mom is recovering from surgery, and unfortunately she’s continued to smoke cigarettes along the way, making her recovery more prolonged and difficult. I feel like driving is the same for me. I’m so much more relaxed when I find some other way to get where I’m going, even if it takes a lot longer or requires a little huffing and puffing. But somehow I still often wind up behind the wheel when it’s not necessary.

I’m a big believer in mass transit as a way for cities to function better. I know society’s dependence on automobiles is bad for the environment and bad for city planning. After WWII we built suburbs around the auto, with big surface parking lots and freeways and separate places for residential and commercial buildings. It was an unmitigated disaster. Suburbs are in my opinion a terrible place to be. There’s even worse traffic than in high-density urban areas, yet there’s no vitality, just faceless ubiquity. And it’s the car’s fault! Yet what do I do day after day? I pass up the bus and climb behind the wheel.

I often think of that line from “Synchronicity II” by The Police: “packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes”. I don’t want to be a lemming, but I am one. I’m seduced by the romantic notion of blasting off, completely in control of where I’m going and when. I’m seduced by cars themselves, so much that I spend thousands more to own and maintain an old BMW that I dreamed about having as a kid—and that followed the Mustang I owned and had dreamt about before that.

I guess I’m writing this because I want to know: Is it possible to have it both ways? Can you love cars and love driving but then keep yourself away the majority of the time?

Maybe it’s best to think of it like food. Busses and bikes and my own two feet are like bread. They’re the daily sustenance I need to stay healthy. The 733i in my driveway is the cake. It sounds nice to eat cake at every meal, but soon it will start to make you sick. You’ve got to make it the treat.

But all this is easier said than done. What happens tomorrow when it’s 11:30am, I have to be downtown for a meeting at 12:00, and it’s too late to take the bus? It’s all a vicious cycle. But I wouldn’t want Valarie’s mom to stop trying to give up cigarettes out of futility. So where did I put those bus tickets?

A Capital Idea

As email has come to rival the telephone as one of society's most ubiquitous communication tools, I've often been curious about how writing style differs in that format from the traditional printed word. In particular, I wonder why people often refrain altogether from using capitals.

When I write emails, I still capitalize the first letter of the first word in a sentence, along with the usual proper names and so on. But at least half the people I know don't capitalize a single thing. And it's not something I can dismiss as mere laziness, because for some reason the people I find most consistently favoring a no-capitals email style are some of the smartest I know. My editors at the New York Times, for example, are almost exclusively no-capital. So is my friend Ady, who finished high school early and now is a documentary filmmaker, graphic artist, furniture maker, silk screener and classically trained musician. Ditto for my friend Chad, who is the most gifted musician I've ever known. What is it that drives these people to the conclusion that the email format has rendered capital letters obsolete when hundreds of years of printed writing deemed it necessary?

I don't want to simply be a curmudgeon about this, because I know that language has always been a fluid, evolving entity. But I'm curious: what is it about simply writing these electronically delivered letters and memos that are different? We were all consistently using capitals with word processing programs for years before email came along, although those were still geared toward something printed. Is it because email usually never leaves a computer screen that capitals are unnecessary? If so, that makes capitalized names and sentence-beginning words the equivalent of the nicer clothes we wear when we're going out, and a non-caps style more like the sweat pants we wear in the comfort of home when nobody important is around.

But that explanation doesn't completely satisfy me either, because I think that part of what attracts people to caps-free email style is its graphic appeal. Without those occasional capital letters, somehow the collection of words and sentences looks more consistent from a visual perspective. You might even say it looks cool. After all, a lot of graphic design, be it album covers or billboards, favors text with no capitals. I just can't decide if I like this. I guess I find the issue to be intellectually interesting, but at the same time, when somebody writes me a message without using capital letters, I still always feel the nagging desire to print out the message and fill the page with corrective red pen marks.

The Bookcase

Whether it’s waking up in the morning or crashing for a few minutes in the afternoon, I often find myself staring at the bookshelf directly across from the foot of our bed. The collection of books does not represent our favorites, per se. Those are in the living room. But there are still plenty of titles that spark my imagination.

Stacked on top is a quintessential yin-yang for Valarie on me. First there is a collection of philosophy books that she picked up at Powell’s recently, as part of a developing interest in the subject that seems in part to have resulted from the election. Underneath those books is a copy of Clyde the Glide, the Clyde Drexler autobiography I’ll probably never read but was very excited to have autographed by my basketball hero a few weeks ago. Then there is a collection of poems by Anne Sexton, a similarly suicidal and brilliant contemporary of Sylvia Plath that my friend Chad got me into about ten years ago (yikes!) when I was living with him in Washington, DC.

And speaking of years ago, one always minds to hang onto a few books read in college, which for me includes The Complete Works of Tacitus, from a history of ancient Rome I enjoyed freshman year at NYU, and Goethe’s Faust, which I enjoyed but can’t remember the class for which it was read.

Further down the shelf there are a handful of books about various Monty Python players, such as Cleese Encounters and The Life of Michael. There’s also an old hardbound biography of Thomas Jefferson that we got while living in New York when Valarie’s neighbors Jack and Stan, who lived across the hall from her apartment, decided to get rid of about a hundred different titles. Several more of their books are lying around here somewhere—and curiously, we’ve heard from Valarie’s old roommate that Jack & Stan now live in Portland. I always remember how one of them was working in the World Trade Center on September 11, but made it out safely. In shock that day, he apparently kept wondering, “Where is my desk now?”

There is a copy of Spalding Gray’s Impossible Vacation that is right at eye level as I lie in bed, and looking at it of course it’s impossible not to think of his suicide earlier this year. I remember reading an essay of his while I was working at Nick’s Italian Café in McMinnville right after college. It was part of a collection called Drinking, Smoking and Screwing: Great Writers on Good Times. I remember reading Gray’s piece, about trying to score with girls as a young man in Boston, as I stood frying onions for a sausage lasagna.

Then there are all the little knickknacks sitting on the shelves in front of the books, which I’ll summarize briefly: (1) an antique 8mm movie camera that used belong to my grandparents that you have to wind up; (2) a plastic miniature of a Buddhist shrine in Tokyo that I bought as a souvenir there in June; (3) a miniature Oregon Ducks helmet a Nike designer gave me several years ago when I was writing a story about the football team’s new uniforms; (4) a magic 8-ball; (5) a small book of Chinese calligraphy and ink drawings given to me by the landscape architect from Suzhou, China who designed Portland’s Classical Chinese Garden, after a lecture about the garden he gave as part of a series I helped coordinate while working at the American Institute of Architects; (6) a framed photo of Valarie’s nephew on a fishing trip with her dad; (7) a miniature movie camera with the “Ebert & Roeper” TV show logo I was given as a souvenir from the Ebert & Roeper Film Festival At Sea, a 4-day Bahamas cruise I went on for a travel magazine this past April; (8) A framed prize-winning poem about Valarie’s recently departed grandmother (her “Nan”), written by Valarie’s niece; (9) a small plaster stature of the Buddha given to me by Brian Borello, a local artist, when he had a show at the AIA’s gallery a few years back; and (10) a copy of Sit On a Potato Pan, Otis, an illustrated book of palindromes I gave Valarie for Christmas several years ago.