After inventing the Model T, Henry Ford took a puffof his cigar, leaned back in his seat and said to himself while thoroughly chuffed, “I really did it this time. The ubiquitous machine.”

When I sat there at the factory tinkering, all I could think about was how I wanted the Machine to spew gut, pluck and spark. Gears scrape metal the same way tanks trundle dirt. Thunk, ka-dunk. Was it so wrong to conspire this way? Even the most imperial girl has downloaded the exhaust pipe update to her form, relishing in a sort-of constant sputtering.

In Los Angeles, everyone drives towards the same horizontal infinite, creating a spectacle out of sitting in traffic.

A. The voices in your head tell you to get a frappuccino with extra whipped cream. You listen, obviously. Summer heat places pressure on the amygdala and melts the ice now rattling at the bottom of your cup. Suddenly, the car horn starts to look as good as your sugar-bomb of a beverage. Your vibrational level isn’t resonating with the car that sped past and cut you off, so the hand that isn’t wrapped around the cup flips them the bird.

B. Bootleg vape from the smoke shop called something like Smoke Phat falls between your driver’s seat and the center console. As you push trash aside to dig for it, your 1998 Toyota Corolla rides up on the curb and gets totally fucked. Oh well, you sigh, as if your life still makes sense without your beater. No other motorized vehicle could ever fill the hole in your heart. The bus is unfathomable, a Lime scooter impossible. The new shape of your reality is incomprehensible and reproachable. Consider moving to New York.

C. License plate frame that says #BLESSED ! in the unironic way. When the traffic light turns green, the car doesn’t move. Angel energy manifestation, complete bliss. Get out of your stopped car to walk around, but try not to because this is not the third world. It’s the Reaganite consciousness in real time: America larping as an extended California. You barrel down a street called Magic Avenue where two wizards keep a car on cinder blocks in the driveway.

Where’s the open road now? What about my divine right to a muscle car? I took the traffic pill when I came out on American soil and its effects were sedating. Driving was once libidinal excitement, though I find it now to be a total castrating force on my innate sensuality. A hand out the window grabs smog by the fistful and I stuffmy pockets with it.

When Chris Burden crucified himself to his powder-blue Beetle, it was a distillation of the car as our cross to bear: an invention that arrived as an American savior, a crucible of mobility, tar and speed. It was full-throttled flesh and cultural fetish, a brutal image that fused sacrifice and machine.

Johnny Knoxville’s Rent-a-Car Crash-Up Derby Stunt from Jackass (2002) movie rendered the rented automobile into a disposable commodity — owned by no one and meant for temporary use. The car sans owner is a faceless assortment of parts capable of being obliterated without concern, as if we were never supposed to progress past the invention of the cylinder and piston. Destroy the car, return to the Earth. Embody the car, drive down to the core together. See: Ed Kienholz buried in the front seat of his brown 1940 Packard Coupe.

You don’t really own a car as much as you haunt it.

Ashlynn Trane in the Pup-Pup Bimbomobile.

Zoe Alameda in the Mcdonald’s Drive-Thru Jalopy.

Reimagining their personal cars as extensions of themselves and their practice, Alameda and Trane fashion the automobile into a multi-faceted object: sculpture/sanctuary, armor/avatar, exhibition/exorcism. The car may operate as an installation in context, but the dashboard is functionally a diary. Coolant leaks as autobiography, commute as collaboration, dents as proof of concept. Here in your car, you scream. You sob. You scroll. You drive nowhere forever. There’s no ETA. Aura farming in this bitch. I turned my trauma into a Toyota. Every scratch is a hard launch. Every oil change is a vibe shift.

If you saw me driving, no you didn’t.

– Maria Camacho