BITAW
ni Ricky de Ungria

Drive who said

It must never fail to perplex or amuse my friends here or the pedicab drivers and the guards by the SPDA gate whenever they see me riding public when I have a nice beetle parked in my driveway to ferry me to wherever duty or mood takes me. When I catch myself standing in the sun by the highway and ruing the wait for the aircon bus or jeepney to downtown Davao, I just shake my head and drily smile as a way of kicking myself on the butt. I suspect my car even takes it against me whenever I keep it behind the bars of my gate. When I sit behind its wheels the very next day, something happens-the horn gets locked, a tire needs air, the battery acts up. I think I have began to understand perfectly how a car becomes the most demanding of pets, or the favorite in the family, or even one's alter ego.

The thing is, even if I have gained enough confidence in driving such that I can now overtake pedicabs and trucks on the highway or even take in friends as (horrors!) passengers, I essentially do not like driving.

For one, there is no other choice when one drives but to sit down-and I hate sitting down. Because ninety-eight percent of my life each day is spent with my spine perpendicular to my thigh bones (or nearly so: I'm a great sloucher) behind my office desk or before my class, I take every single chance to stand up or walk about. I'm the kind of guy who goes to the movies just so I can stand in peace at the back of the orchestra section and, accidentally, be entertained. When I was younger, I nobly gave up my seat on the bus for women and the elderly just so I could have an excuse to stand up. I've tried to sleep on my feet but my all-too-human anatomy wouldn't let me. When, like walking the dog, I have no choice but to bring my car to the city, I leave it at the mall parking lot and lose no time in getting around on my feet to exact revenge for having sat through the ride. Though I do not flaunt it, I love my feet more than I love my books and CDs.

For another, driving is worse than, say, running a department or a college. On the road, hundreds of little driverly decisions impinge on my mind at any given moment, crowding out the thoughts I have prepared myself to wrestle with early in the day or had to think just the same for an arrant deadline or the moment's errantry. Driving is ontology, physics, and metamorphoses per second. Thinking three or four cars ahead of and behind me, or of the narrow margins of temerity and challenge in relation to those alongside me, just hems me in and exhausts me. These are normal paranoias of new drivers, I imagine. But given the irredeemable recklessness, stupidity, and nastiness of motorists and pedestrians alike, the vigilance that driving requires just sucks the bristles out of my aura and leaves me all worked up and limp. I have to contend with the nuts and bolts of the real-or the reality of life and death, mine or someone else's-at every single moment. The realms of superlative thought and fantasy just fade into the background-pretty casualties of forward-hurtling speed.

I have began to believe that there is no such thing as an experienced driver-except, of course, in terms of driving hours logged, which really do not make much of a difference. Behind the wheel, one is always, as the German poet Rilke put it in another context, "a perpetual beginner." The configurations of things in motion are always changing and new, and the apparent plasticity of space continues to delude the perceptions and calculations of those angling to fill it at the expense of another. (This is actually what makes driving fascinating.) And because the possibilities and combinations of driverly moves-minute or otherwise, and in a kind of musical call-and-response-are as staggering as those in chess, one thinks visually all the time-although one disposes of these traffic maps as quickly as they flash by in one's consciousness at every moment in time such that one hardly feels the activity and pressure of having thought at all. Still, this sort of intellection takes its toll.

In no other ordinary human activity is one's life more tangibly delivered to one's own hands and put at stake than, you guessed it, driving. The sad thing is that this fact is easy to forget-especially when driving is thought of as a routinary, missionary-position-like activity-as it is a tease to turn on its head, as I often do, just to see what would happen.

Even when I was young, I had already loved to experiment with my limitations and play games with space and time. My imagination more than made up for what I materially lacked. In driving, I have discovered that one can only go so far with its theme of gearshifts and front focus-it's the variations in steering and gas-pedal pushing that are worth the drive. If I step on the gas this much and steer to the right this much even without visually checking if I've passed him, would he hit me? and where? or would he slow down, and by how much? Maybe if I turn the wheel this much at this point I won't hit the garage post backing up. Maybe if I turn the wheel this much at this point I won't hit the gate corner coming out. Such amateurish designing impulses, however, I have tried almost successfully to rein in, especially since they have resulted in scratches on my car's front left and rear right fenders, a nearly broken tail pipe, and a fractured but now mended post of my car's kubo. Each time I back my car safely to its crib is proof that God exists and watches over me and my bug. But, truly, it is easy to be consumed by the power handed one behind the wheels as it is effortless to be instantaneously changed into a very dangerous person capable of unwittingly doing real evil to real people on the road.

Then too, faced with such blatant human folly and simple stupidity on the road, I have found myself worked up unnecessarily into such murderous rage-held at bay only by a litany of unheard-of curses and homicidal hornblasts-that I had to keep reminding myself to keep cool, breathe at regular intervals, and just shake the jerk off with my head like the stupid car dashboard poodle figurine with springy neck I abhor. I tell you, driving is the only recent activity I indulged in that renewed my contact with those primal instincts of my youth that I have already forsworn-and this is only Davao road discourtesy, which has not yet reached the standards of mindlessness and amorality found in Manila's roads. Keeping my emotions under control while on the road is an added burden to me-though, to up the ante, so to speak, I have looked at it as an opportunity to do, ahem, zen.

Finally, when one drives, one cannot afford to really admire the view around him-whether the beauties be geographic, climatic, architectural, or human. Taking my eyes off the road, say, three blinks longer to check out the pretty things by the roadside or beyond, changes the driving conditions perceptibly-I have veered a little to the right, or a biker out of nowhere is suddenly to my left. Meanwhile, every confluence of little delightful things that make life worth the while is passing me by. What a sad and unjust state of mobile affairs driving is. Although it gives me a sense of power and control over my destiny, it deadens the life-affirming and excitable axons of my sensorium.

All my life thus far, I have commuted and surrendered my life to the hands of bus, jeepney, and taxi drivers whose ignorance and flouting of road rules have suspiciously left me whole and intact and unrepentant. For me, nothing beats the warmth and discomfort of human contact up close-sweaty and fetid and pressing back thoughtlessly and all. I've trained myself to get used to this aggravation because, well, I had no choice, and because I continue to derive pleasure in losing myself in a crowd that I have unjustly thought of as different from me-gobbling up and savoring their conversation topics; their dialectal intonations and use of words; their heartaches and sense of humor; their uncategorizable shapes and sizes; their scents and getups and accessories; their bags and groceries and purses; the color of their nails and the wornoutness or novelty of their shoes; their skin tones and shapeliness of their mouths and eyes and noses and throats and breasts and fingers and legs and toes; their shared physiognomies, especially among families on board; their silences, anxieties, or blankmindedness. Alienating loner that I am, and doubly isolated when in my car, I have found that being with them makes me happily commonly human, stirring unspeakable sources of sympathy and discomfort in me yet putting me at ease in their company even in spite of dire thoughts of a shared tragic fate with them. The high is satoric, even if inside jeepneys it is impossible to stand.

Still, like the tortured way to the maelstrom of truth that our present political affairs have taken, I will have to absurdly make my peace with driving, hoping that-like the irrecoverable truth-driving will set me free and unimpeachably and unconscionably empower me to keep my cool and watch the world go by at last. Yeah yeah yeah!

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