I made one of the scariest purchases of my life on March 24th of this year when I ordered a Tesla Model 3. I haven’t bought a brand new car since 1991, I usually buy them when they’re a couple of years old to let someone else take the initial depreciation hit. Let’s just say somewhere between the intersection of the hyperinflation of used car prices, EV tech and infrastructure getting remarkably better, insane gas prices, and sheer desire to have one the stars somehow aligned and I worked up the courage.
Those who’ve been following my blog since March have heard about all of the ups and downs of the Tesla ordering process. It’s truly been a roller coaster. My estimated delivery date has moved seven or eight times since March, backward and forward. I’ve been checking the app for updates no less than three times a day. Then on Saturday my wife and I were watching The Gray Man on Netflix (not a spectacular film btw), things got real.
During a breif pause to get snacks I checked the Tesla app and BOOM, I got a VIN# and my delivery window shrunk from two weeks to five days. My pulse quickened.
Shortly after I woke up the next day I got this text.
haha, YES!
As quirky and strange as Tesla's hedgehog meme is it sums up the feeling brilliantly. My particular Model 3, GreyMatter, (my wife came up with the name) was “born” in the Freemont, CA factory late last week and is on the back of a car carrier making the long trek to Minnesota.
"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life." - Steve Jobs
As my delivery date nears I can’t help but think how the age of internal combustion engines and most everything that’s petroleum-powered is coming to and end. ICE vehicles won’t disappear overnight but over the coming decade they’ll definitely dwindle to become a rarer and rarer sight.
I also think about how petrol has been interwoven into the fabric of so many of my memories. The smell of diesel generators at outdoor concerts or State Fairs, diesel exhaust from semi trucks during carefree summer roadtrips, the smell of unfiltered car exhaust when I was a boy walking to the store with my Mom, or the raw gasoline in my Dad’s garage. He taught us to clean greasy bike parts with an old toothbrush and gasoline with our bare hands, something unheard of today. To this day I’m instantly transported back to the summertime barbeques of the 1970’s when I smell someone lighting a grill with petroleum charcoal lighter.
Those days will come to a end during my lifetime. There will soon be a generation that knows nothing of it except what they read.
As GenX gets grayer around the temples it's awfully easy for us to become cynics. Middle age is an era of saying goodbye to things and this is yet another one. This must be what it felt like for those people living in the era that coal was being phased out for residential use or when the car was replacing the horse and buggy. Yet another new age is upon us. Despite all of the doom, gloom, and f*ckery in many ways it sure is exciting to be living right here and now, watching all of these dots connect.
~Eric Vance Walton~
Poetry should move us, it should change us, it should glitch our brains, shift our moods to another frequency. Poetry should evoke feelings of melancholy, whimsy, it should remind us what it feels like to be in love, or cause us to think about something in a completely different way. I view poetry, and all art really, as a temporary and fragile bridge between our world and a more pure and refined one. This is a world we could bring into creation if enough of us believed in it. This book is ephemera, destined to end up forgotten, lingering on some dusty shelf or tucked away in a dark attic. Yet the words, they will live on in memory. I hope these words become a part of you, bubble up into your memory when you least expect them to and make you feel a little more alive.
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