Everyone is Dented, Everyone is Broken
How living in LA has helped me understand humanity better
For the first ten years of my life in LA, I ignored cars as much as I could for the simple reason that I never drove. Ever. Believe it or not, I took the LA Metro, the bus, and/or Lyft everywhere for a decade. When I was going to SC, I took the Metro and a shuttle to campus (one-way commute time: 1 hour). When I taught at UC Irvine, I took the LA Metro, the Amtrak, & a local Orange County bus to campus (one-way commute time: 2.5 hours). When I taught at CSUN, I took the LA Metro and two buses to campus (one-way commute time: 1.25 hours). As a proud Chicagoan who’s also lived in NYC, Seattle, Portland, & Buenos Aires, I’m used to taking mass transit. In fact, I used to be such a staunch defender of mass transit that I wrote an essay for the Huffington Post UK where I argued that driving both epitomized and reinforced the worst parts of the American ethos. A big part of me still believes that, but I have to admit that living in LA has shifted my view a bit.
In every place that you drive, the drivers are embodying the cultural, class, racial, historical, & yes, gender rules of that place, but that is another essay for another time.
Fast forward to 2022 and I’ve been driving in LA for a couple years now (and close to six years total) and not only has my perception of this city changed, but also my understanding of its urban planning, sheer size, class spatialization, architecture, microclimates, & spatial riffing. Among other things, I’m more afraid of this city than before because now I know how aggressive, selfish, impatient, & fast LA drivers are. I’m reminded of the many ways that LA instantiates itself, embodies itself, & defines itself every single time I get behind the wheel. In fact, every single city does. D.C. tells you so much about itself through the way that people drive. Ditto with small town America and farm town USA and college towns and senior citizen communities. In every place that you drive, the drivers are embodying the cultural, class, racial, historical, & yes, gender codes of that place, but that is another essay for another time.
In a way, the cars in LA tell a story about class, gender, & race in LA that I think is worth fleshing out.
What I’m interested in writing about is gonna seem random and culturally insignificant, but I promise it’s not. I wanna talk about the sheer number of dented, busted-up, partially, and/or janky cars in this city. Never in my life have I seen so many cars with dents, scrapes, broken (or completely missing) bumpers, smashed windows, & duct-taped side mirrors. And that’s not just because I live in a residential part of Hollywood with lots of working class and middle class families either, many of them Latine. In a way, the cars in LA tell a story about class, gender, & race in LA that I think is worth fleshing out. Among other things:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Mixtape by Jackson Bliss | ジャクソンのミクステープ to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.