Slurpees & Murder

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I feel like I can trust you, gentle reader, so I am going to tell you a secret about myself — a dark and terrible secret, one that could throw my reputation into jeopardy and cost me countless friends and acquaintances were it to spread too quickly or too far. Could  you lean in for a second? Just humour me, here.
   
I know it’s not something you’re supposed to admit to, especially given what we know nowadays, but... well, I’ll just come right out and say it: I really like driving.
   
This isn’t easy for me, a man who so enthusiastically supports pedestrian bridges and improved transit systems and the fight against urban sprawl. Yet here I am, having to admit to myself how much I enjoy driving a car. Oh, the scandal! The shame! The guilt!
   
This deep psychological failing of mine, like most things in the grand psychoanalytic tradition, can probably be blamed on my parents. Well, no, that’s not really fair; I myself don’t have any experience in child-rearing but I can understand how frazzled, sleep-deprived new parents would be willing to do just about anything to get their offspring to calm down and go to sleep. If the one and only thing that got your kid to be quiet was fireworks, hell, you’d just have to buy a whole lot of fireworks, wouldn’t you? You do what you have to.
   
In my case, the only thing that sufficiently soothed me was car rides — so, when I wouldn’t go to sleep, which was most of the time, the fastest and most efficient solution was to pop me in the back of ye olde station wagon and drive me around town until the motion of the automobile finally lulled me into slumber. Even as I got older, long car rides remained the easiest way (or at least the easiest that didn’t have "Nintendo" written on it) to keep me pacified; pop me in the back seat and I’d quietly stare out the window and listen to music, two other activities that I’m still very good at.
   
Thing is, even with the ‘high’ gas prices of the 1980s (and boy, do those look adorable from a modern perspective), driving was still considered a respectable activity back then. It was acceptable in those days, like smoking indoors or drinking at lunch or wearing eyeglasses the size of dinner plates.
   
With my characteristic modesty, I assure you that I grew up to be a really awesome driver as an adult; heck, I’m one of the 10 or 11 people in this city who actually use their turn signals. Regardless of the traffic conditions or my time constraints, I feel an odd and eerie serenity when I’m driving a car. (And serenity while surrounded by Winnipeg drivers is an eerie serenity, indeed.) But with all that we know now about the environmental impact of driving, with the disastrous urban-planning decisions made in its name, and with the price of gas well over a dollar a litre for five or six years now? Cripes, if my urbanist friends found out I enjoy driving, they’d look at me like I grew a second head and then the second head started smoking an entire pack of cigarettes at once.
   
Driving is a really ugly habit; it’s nasty, dirty, wasteful — and good Lord, is it ever expensive. And yet, it’s one of the few things that allows me an almost perfect calm, even despite my strong personal beliefs in transit and walkability as cures for the ills of modern urban society. So you can see my difficulty, here. I’m trying to reform, but there isn’t really any easy resolution; this is just something that I have to learn to accept about myself.
   
Heaven help me, I’m a recuperating driver.
   
James Hope Howard has already driven all the way to Oak Lake and back this week. Shameful.

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