That time God picked up my car and set it back down in 2006 (also, my prediction that human driven cars will be deemed unsafe & illegal within the next 30 years)

But Elon Musk will still be the richest man on earth!

There’s nothing like a terrifying memory to start off a substack post, is there?

Years ago, I worked as a “check collector” for Target Corp in Minneapolis. This required me to work a four hour morning shift from 7 am to 11 am every other Saturday. For two years, on alternating weekends, I rolled myself out of bed at the proverbial butt crack of dawn and made the approximately 17 minute trip from St Paul to work to call customers who had written a bad check at any Target store in America. I like to affectionately refer to Minnesota as Cold Gitmo because it’s the place I spent the first 37 years of my life indefinitely detained. And it’s so cold. As cold as Siberia, for anywhere between six to nine months of the year. As you probably guessed, during the cold season, that 17 minute hop, skip, and a jump across the Mississippi River to Minneapolis took closer to 25 minutes, not including the 5 minutes it took to warm up my cute green Daewoo Lanos. So on this particular January morn in the frozen tundra, there had been a nice snrain (a cross between snow and rain) which then froze overnight, leaving a potentially very exciting layer of black ice on the roads — and on every inch of my car. Where it would normally take me 2.5 minutes exactly to brush the snow off my windows (yes, I had it down to a science!), it was now taking me almost 10 minutes to scrape ice off my side windows (where the car does not defrost) and another ten minutes to scrape the back and front windshield because it was so cold that the heat coming through the vents was barely making a difference. My fingers were so cold in my fleece lined leather mittens that it felt like my fingers were brittle enough to break off inside the mitts. And tell me if you’ve ever met anyone like this: if Sarah knows it takes 25 minutes to get somewhere, then she gives herself 24 and speeds. And I had actually given myself five extra minutes knowing I’d have to scrape the car! Echoes of my mom’s admonition to ALWAYS brush the snow/scrape the ice completely off every window played in my head … “do you want to die, Sarah Louise?” “No, mom, come on.” “No, not come on. You can’t be like the lazy dumb people who drive with their vision obstructed. [This was a metaphor for life itself, right?] It’s choosing to get into an accident. Would you choose to get into an accident?” “No, mom.” “Alright, then what are you going to do?” “I’m going to brush all the snow off the car before I drive.” “And what happens every time you sit behind the steering wheel of a car?” I would recite, “I’m getting inside a loaded weapon that could kill me or another person, and I’m responsible for the lives of every person in the car.” “Ok, good girl. That’s my daughter.” Lol. No pressure. Thanks, mom.

I chuckle now at how brilliantly my mom programmed me — like a damn software engineer!! — but at the time, as I buckled up for safety, I just felt the same old fear of getting into an accident. The click of the seatbelt sounded like the harbinger of inevitabilty to me — as though I were sealing my own fate as I shifted into drive. I asked God (I literally prayed, out loud) to surround my car with a circle of angels of protection, led by Archangel Michael, and to surround all vehicles everywhere on Earth with extra angels of protection, and to let there be no plane, train, or automobile accidents anywhere on Earth. (I had been doing this every time I got into a car since the summer of 2001 but that’s a story for another day.)

Now, this will only be germane to people who are familiar with St Paul, but I include the street details because it makes for a more intense visual as you read, dear subscriber, and it’s interesting for people who do live there. I lived at 960 Goodrich Ave at the time and was parked on the so-called wrong side of the street so I drove to the corner and turned left on Chatsworth so that two blocks later, I can turn left onto the main drag, Grand Avenue. From there, I planned to turn right on the next main drag, Lexington, which would take me to the freeway to Minneapolis. At the corner of Grand Ave and Lexington was a Blockbuster Video (lol) and as I approached the Blockbuster on my right, turning on my blinker to turn right, I slowed down instinctively to check for oncoming traffic because many a car has been seen sliding (against the driver’s will in a bizarro non-consent non-roleplay with Snow as the sadistic master) through an intersection. The light was soon to turn red anyway and always better to be late than dead (as my Uncle John used to say). But my light didn’t turn red and the nearest car was, say, 3 blocks away coming at me from the left. I began to turn the steering wheel to the right, the Blockbuster looming an all too beige cast in my peripheral vision on the right. I’ll be late to work, I thought, but maybe I could smooth-talk HR out of giving me an occurrence. But there was a problem: my car wouldn’t turn right. My car wouldn’t move at all. And now the light is red and that car that was three blocks away? It’s now half a block a way and I’m out in the middle of the intersection and the glare ice is so slippery there’s no way that car is going to be able to stop. My tires spin on a fast track to nowhere. I’m dead. It’s ok though because my niece and nephew, my sister, my aunt and uncle, and my three cousins know I love them. I just hugged them and told them the other day. So it’s ok. Please don’t let anyone in the other car die, God, please God. But then suddenly, I’m going up — I mean, into the sky, straight up. You know how a roller coaster descent makes your stomach go up, and you feel it lift? This was the opposite — my stomach was going down and my body is going up. Wait — what the fuck? Seconds later I open my eyes (when did I close them???) expecting to see Archangel Gabriel, my deceased mom, Great Grandma Aanonson who passed away in 1994, maybe sit down with Archangel Michael to do my life review and go over what went right, what went wrong, but noooo … I’m still a-freaking-live!!! You know what I see? You know what I freaking see? (Also my foot is not on the gas, the car is not in park, it’s sitting perfectly still in drive which is when I then put my foot on the break, shift into park, and put on my hazard lights to give myself a minute to figure out what the hell has just happened.)

What I see is that the Blockbuster Video is now on my left. My left. My freaking left. I’m on the other side of the street: I look behind me and cars are going up and down Lexington, perpendicular to me, but I don’t see any cars on Grand with me or coming toward me.

I dig my cell phone out of my purse and dial cousin K with now warmed and very alive shaking fingers and tell her what happened, and she says, “I guess God didn’t want you taking Lexington to I-94! Ha ha ha.” Yeah right — so fucking funny! But it is, of course, so so soooo hilarious. She says, “Better take Dale.” Only a mile in both directions out of the way but I agree and before we hang up, she tells me to call when I get there so she knows I got to work safe.

And here’s the real miracle. By this time, I’m driving down Grand in the wrong direction at 6:50 a.m. but when I clocked in, it was 7:04 on the dot (an occurrence gets recorded at 5 minutes late) despite driving like a little old lady on the interstate, spooked out of my mind!

It’s impossible. I still don’t know what in God’s name happened that day. I think God or Archangel Michael picked my car up and set it back down. But who knows? Too bad there is probably not any NSA surveillance footage of that morning because I would love to see it, I can tell you that much.

Two years later, in 2008, I sold my car and strictly used public transportation until I bought my ’93 Cadillac Deville in 2017. Oh yes, I thought (had been brainwashed to believe) that I was saving the planet! Annnnnd I was avoiding all possible car accidents too! Ha ha — VICTORY! God wasn’t going to move me (literally!!) around on the chess board like some earth-raping gas-guzzling pawn, no siree Bob! Done! Finished! No car, no car accidents!! See how that works?!?

But seriously, I have experienced several true miracles in my life, and I am not one to tempt Fate. I don’t need or want to be on the receiving end of a divine bail-out every single winter — forget that (my rationale at the time). When I was a teenager, my mom’s insurance agent stopped by for a visit and told me that for young people under age 25, the question is not IF they get into a car accident, it’s when. Hilariously, the only time I ever did get into an accident was in 2007 at the 3 way stop sign intersection at the top of Ramsey Hill next to Nathan Hale Park in St Paul. It was busy rush hour traffic: Summit Avenue was a parking lot on this warm summer day. The woman in the car behind me — remember, we’re both at a complete stop — is on her phone with her psychiatrist (lol) when she lifts her foot off the break pedal, causing her car to tap my bumper. So we both pull over and get out of our cars; she finally (!) ends the call with Dr Xanax and she starts telling me, “you don’t understand, I’m a good person; I’m a good person — I was just on the phone with my psychiatrist!!” No, I didn’t do a communication analysis on the spot and tell her that she, the lady, doth protest too much, that her words indicate profound amounts of guilt and shame, both of which are very likely justified, and that her real problem was that no pharmaceutical is a substitute for self-forgiveness and the spiritual practice of atonement, because I’m suuuuuure her psychiatrist was guiding her through that process and not just plying her full of SSRI’s. I mean, really. What kind of literal hell on earth do you think we live in? She told me (finally confessed after 2 phone conversations) that if I reported her through an insurance claim that she would lose her driver’s license so I thought for a minute and said, “ok, no problem — just pay it forward. Next time you can choose to forgive someone instead of choosing their punishment, remember this time we talked and maybe give a second chance instead.” She offered me cash, and I said that paying me would mean that she literally had to pay for the mistake, that my car barely had a scratch, I was fine, just try to forgive yourself so you don’t do it again! (Now, don’t think I was being that kind: when I was 17, I tapped someone’s bumper — twice! — and got forgiveness (mercy) instead of punishment (justice), so I was merely practicing what I had been taught by example. If it had been a bad accident, please know I would have pressed the issue to the point of lawyers, if necessary.) This lady was stunned and completely silent on the other end of the line. I hope she had a great session with her shrink the next day.

Now, as for Mr. Musk and his Tesla contraption: I recently enjoyed a short ride in the passenger seat of a Tesla two weeks ago (on a date!! This guy took me to the Pink Taco in Navy Yard — you HAVE to go, so delicious; if you’re in DC, go there for amazing drinks and Mexican fare). These cars are pretty cool, I admit. I take issue with the child slave labor involved in the process of harvesting the car battery materials but the iPhone has the same amount of slave labor involved in harvesting materials for its batteries; at least Teslas are made in the US and not Communist China. And, I got to see first hand how the car can parallel park … itself!! Now, you’re talking to the daughter of a Baby Boomer born in 1947, a young girl who learned how to drive in a proverbial (and actual) ’57 Chevy. So when I was 16 in 1997, she made me parallel park on Grand Avenue in the middle of rush hour traffic so that I would learn the muscle memory of doing it quickly, and without concern for the car behind me that was inconvenienced for a whole 15 seconds. She had to, in order to override the good girl programming that compelled my fellow all-girls Catholic schoolmates to avoid holding up traffic and making another person have to wait OR they screwed up the attempt to parallel park twice and then pulled out anyway. As a brief aside, I had also for some reason intuitively mastered what I called “the pull-in method” and my 3 younger cousins (mentioned above) would always be shocked and so impressed when I did not have to parallel park! But my mom would often say, “Sarah, you’re cutting it too close, and one day, you’re going to scrape another car!” And I would say, “No, mom, don’t you get it?? The Pull-In method?!? Ha ha ha!” And she would say, “oh, I get it — do you get it??” (I really didn’t.) But she was right! And I did scrape another car the summer after my senior year of high school. You’re not going to believe this: the owner of the car had been going to donate the car anyway for the tax deduction so when they called our landline phone number (which I left on the windshield on a note) they were like, don’t worry about it. And that was the last time I ever did the pull-in method! Which, as my mom pointed out, is about as effective as the pull-out method. Lol!! After she died when I was 19, I’d make myself parallel park on Grand on Saturday nights when everyone was trying to get a spot, just to make sure I could still do it.

So, Elon Musk has said that autonomous vehicles make mistakes but not nearly as often as humans. And you guys, he’s not wrong. The AI in a self-driving car doesn’t get tired, distracted, sad, or nervous. It appears that it may be a few years before fully autonomous vehicles can be rolled out en masse. But to put it in perspective, just think how different — and improved — today’s iPhone is compared to the very first model.

Elon Musk @elonmusk

Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta is now available to anyone in North America who requests it from the car screen, assuming you have bought this option. Congrats to Tesla Autopilot/AI team on achieving a major milestone!

Accidental death is the third leading cause of death in the United States, as of 2019. Your odds of being injured in a car accident are 1 in 107: per the National Safety Council, every person in our country with a driver’s license and a functional vehicle has about a 0.91% chance of ending up as a victim of a driving-related accident. About 85% of Americans have a car. Let’s do the math: we are more likely to get into a car accident than we were to die from Covid!! Also, as I often say, there’s a punishment worse than death: car accidents can leave you with lifelong debilitating pain, headaches, concussions, and (it goes without saying) you don’t even have to be in a car to get hit by one! (But the reason I say it is to point out my flawed 27 year old logic above: “no car = no car accident.”) My friend got hit by a car while crossing the street in Washington, DC and she is not the same person (she is, of course, the same but her brain is not). She can’t work out vigorously anymore and has trouble concentrating at work. DCist did a great story where they interviewed 5 residents of the DMV (DC, Maryland, Virginia) about how a car accident changed their lives irrevocably. 3 of them lived and their lives are very very different now; the other 2 lost someone they loved in a brutal way.

My point is that we can see where an argument for the safest car possible — a self driving one — could come from. As mentioned above, rounding up, there’s a 1% chance that a car owner will get injured in a car accident at some point. And there’s a 1 in 608 chance (about .001%) that you will die in a car accident, whether or not you are also in a vehicle. I found that interesting statistic on a personal injury lawyer’s website, quoting the Insurance Information Institute.

One day (I predict), people like my mom’s insurance agent will testify before Congress and say, “for young people under the age of 25, it’s not a matter of if they get into a car accident, but when.” The odds will still be tiny but the wackjobial wackjobs will be loud and suggestible and oh so ready to embrace the outlaw of all “non-autonomous motor vehicles” in the name of Saving the Children! Safety first! You want to keep your old car, that you steer yourself? You want to kill Grandma! And Junior! Sound familiar? Let’s get really real here, please, and I’m sorry we live in hell: if I’d told you in 2019 that if you didn’t submit to an experimental mRNA injection in 2021 that you’d lose your job, would you have believed me?

And look: I have friends who “love driving.” And I love these people: they have a body autonomy — nay, body authority — that inspires me. I want to sit in their passenger seat and go on a road trip with them! I myself prefer the body autonomy of walking or running. Neither of us is wrong: we’re both great, actually! Perfect complements, you could even say.

But your autonomy and my freedom to choose whatever car we want won’t matter to the power hungry — has it ever? Congressman Ima Douche will place blown up photos of car wrecks and splattered corpse on an easel and present the despair of death as art in only the way elected officials can: in an ironic fuckyouial, Igetoffonpainial condescending kind of way. And cars — and freedom itself! — will be outlawed.

We enjoyed a special kind of freedom in our country being able to drive a car simply because we’d taken a class and gotten a piece of paper as long as the person in the passenger’s seat had a license. What, that was going to make you less of an impulsive 15 year old???! Lol!!!

But it was fucking awesome. And don’t ever forget it.

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