superflux

I drive to Flint two to three times per week, along I-75, which is probably one of the most mind-numbing tracts of freeway I’ve ever had the displeasure of driving. I don’t know what exactly it is about it — the flatness, the sameness, the seemingly never-ending asphalt reaching out into oblivion — but I have caught myself more than once, either coming or going, barely able to stay awake for the last 10 minutes of the 50-minute drive.

My driving teeth were cut on long rural drives, curving two-lane blacktops with no streetlights and a saturation level that always gave tiretread a bit of a pause before responding to the gas or brake pedal. So driving for long durations in the middle of nowhere isn’t new to me. Road trips are my jam, and because I’m all about the journey and rarely the destination, I try to break them up into 3-4-hour driving sessions so I can enjoy the process. That, I can do without thinking. So, why, pray tell, does 50-minutes seem to stretch me so thin?

One of the methods I have employed to keep my shit together — because legit, I cannot listen to NPR right now — is practicing Spanish in 30-minute auditory lesson increments or jamming my fucking ass off to music. Sometimes I throw on Bad Bunny to do a bit of both.

I have an exceptional student from Bangladesh working with me right now, and we have great conversations about the many variations and differences in our respective cultural milieus. Not only differences in nationality, religion, and gender, but also in generation — he’s probably 20+ years younger than me — and so it’s fascinating to learn about his perspective on all kinds of topics, totally different lenses than I’d ever have access to. Feels so much like my years of penpalling in my teens, desperately writing to nearly 80 different correspondents at my peak, starving to learn and know more about the world outside of the tiny hamlet in which I had found myself deposited by luck or destiny.

Each month, I select a thematic quote with which to tailor the content of the college’s email newsletter, and this month, it was a gift from one of our treasured truthtellers of all of our times — and on and on and on:

When I read this quote, it connected with me in the context of the great, distilling sameness that is inherent in the development of AI. I have joked that it used to be that you would stand out in a crowd if you wrote like a Yale graduate, but now, you only stand out if you don’t sound like a Yale graduate. Because the great distillation process that is AI, the fine-tuning of the collective human experience and creation into a smooth spirit with exceptional manners and syntax, following even the most arcane grammar rules, takes away all the high and low notes of human experience, rendering a perfectly polished stone. Sure, she looks real purdy, but that shit looks obscene on my finger.

So the sameness that stalks me as I transit to and fro Flint is broken up in a rather glorious manner by Flint’s still rough-and-ready edges, and while Royal Oak definitely inhabits a somewhat gelatinous version of suburbia, there are pockets of weirdness, strangeness that keep it somewhat tolerable.

But I have lost my patience with the worship of grit and resilience lately, because the underlying notion is that there is some type of moral superiority inhabited by those of us who have managed to weather the traumas this world has tossed our way and still manage to be good little capitalists, producing and performing and hustling, the only tears we shed are deep into our bedpillows when the monkeys get a little too reckless on our backs.

So I don’t want to equate this idea of difference with ideas of rough-hewn traumabonding that reminds us all that most of what we have survived wasn’t the result of some kind of grand plan designed to develop deep character and soul within our hearts and minds, but rather sheer, dumb, and chaotic luck — good and bad — and often is the result of decisions made by those who are more focused on their own tiny sphere, they don’t bother to look at how their shit permeates the lives of those who live downstream.

I’d rather have this roughness, this difference, this peculiar humanity, rooted squarely in concepts of mystery, of wonder. Of we don’t know what the fuck is going on and goddammit, that’s okay. Of shadows and dreamscapes, of confusion or that crucial moment where you forget a perfectly normal word like ‘tab’ in the middle of a conversation and, in that second, you wonder why words even are and how they came to be, and what the fuck a tab is anyway.

That difference, that confusion and terror and joy and laughter — that difference is where we grow. And not in the overly obsessive Americana way of perennial hacking ourselves into perfection of one type or another, but in a way that means we find balance, we find peace. When the shit comes at us, we can see it for what it is and we no longer have to surf it, it just washes over us. We develop downyduck hides and that brings a different type of roughness into the picture. “Be like water,” Bruce encouraged us, and everyone knows how rough water can be.

My favorite speck of difference on I-75 heading north is an epic portrait of heysoos, lit up and staring up in an almost desperate manner, betraying the essential paternalism so often attributed to him, implying a bit of uncertainty on his part as we drivers sail by.

ARE YOU ON THE RIGHT ROAD?

Each time, I think to myself — both existentially and literally — I sure fucking hope so. Would hate to have traveled through all this sameness, only to end up in the wrong place.

Thanks for keeping it weird, Dixie Baptist Church.