an elegy for car thing

et tu, spotify?

Every time I say “Ok Google” four times into the empty interior of my car and then ask for Google to please ask Spotify to please play the thing I want to listen to only to be provided something entirely other than the music of my request, it is with a hard heart of ice, because life doesn’t have to be this way, life can be a beautiful landscape of mostly-understood robot requests and songs played on command. Such was life with Car Thing, killed December last, leaving a small but fervent congregation of mourners with plastic and lithium no longer doing anything but sitting separate from the deep parts of the Earth.

Car thing was little known but passionately beloved, and it died too soon.

Car Thing made my Prius’ just-out-of-date music system a dream. Car Thing made my friend’s as-old-as-her Camry a musical marvel. The hovering line of my recently played and the joyful, adjacent wheel sat in my periphery on every journey I have made these last two years. I prefer to live my life to accompaniment. Though just now I am sitting in the bath gone lukewarm listening only to the drip of the faucet and the various hums and aches of my building I am almost always playing something, from my phone or laptop or the purple speaker I bought mostly on impulse days before I left for Montana last summer and named, in the list of Bluetooth devices that pops up on my laptop and phone, Zoombini (if you know you know and if you don't, see below).

for what it’s worth my inkjet and laser printers are named, respectively, the tortoise and the hare and my TV is named marvin (see: hitchhiker’s guide)

I’ve been big on driving since I moved to Utah, which I suppose goes without saying, given relocation from a city with an exquisite if crumbling network of public transit to one whose rail system was designed for the Olympics and whose bus drivers are so nice they wait for me to sit down before they pull away from the curb. In the city I cycle as often as possible, despite the hills, though lately having moved to the top of a hill and plagued more than usual by chronic pain I’ve been car-dependent more than I’d like. But I’ve embraced highway distance the way I accepted hour, hour and a half commutes back home, settling into the driver’s seat as comfortably as into a plastic bench below ground, if more attentively. I’ve driven to and from and around Montana (10 hours round trip from the Centennial Valley to Missoula and back in one day, no problem), through the night to Northern California, to Southern Utah and into Vegas, through Vegas to San Diego and back. I am undaunted by distance, and distance was made sweeter by Car Thing. Riding in my car, my brother heard me say “hey Spotify” and started to laugh at me for calling out the wrong app (surely I meant “ok Google”) before the gentle voice replied with what I’d actually asked for. Now I utter over and over above the music the summons to Google’s AI, turn the music down, try again, get the wrong song.

Song of the day: Baby I Love You by the Ramones

Color of the day: Patone 17-1755 TCX (Paradise Pink)

Shape of the day: heart, duh

Coffee shop of the day: Rose Establishment

Obviously, as usual, I’ve lingered too long, and not sent anything, and now it’s Valentine’s Day. Did you know St. Valentine was beheaded, and that he was the patron saint not only of lovers but also of beekeeping and epilepsy?

I made this last year but who cares

And now Valentine’s Day has passed—I hope you like travelling through time. I hope you thought of bees and honey, or bought some candy cheap. Call this strange skipping onward a commitment to nonlinear narrative, though I suppose we keep on moving forwards.

But more to the point:

I’ve been driving with the radio on lately, now that my music is a lot harder to control, and as I cross signals I’ve been leaving the radio on scan, an unhinged way to listen, the station skipping every few seconds. Christian rock, classical, 80s hits, Christian rock, news, gospel, pop, Christian rock. It isn’t a good listening experience, a jarring dissonance. The tone and voices run into each other and every once in a while the volume slams upwards, but it does begin to feel like an auditory map of the places I pass through. What is the identity of this city as it is mapped across the air?

An ad I heard recently, advertising space for advertisements (ads for ads, an inevitable and tragicomic cycle), said “You can’t hear a billboard or newspaper.” Which I loved, partly because it’s true but mostly because it assumes those are the only other forms of advertising, here in the Year of Our Lord 2025. How is the shape of the ad different when it reaches your ears? I was thinking of my favorite ads: the pool company in Massachusetts whose billboard reads “Your wife is hot!” and the old Life Magazine ad asking “Which type of woman are you?” and all the personals and cigarette ads. I was thinking of every jingle and catchphrase I have committed to memory: call 1-800-steamer, get connected for free with education connection, where’s roscoe (he’s workin!) I was thinking of the little bit of work I’ve done on radio projects and of good video game narratives and of the films I’ve been seeing as part of my job with the Sundance Film Festival, how stories, which I am used to creating on the page, are refolded and reorganized by the medium in which I meet them. It’s not a new thought but it’s funnier now.

I’m going to be mad about Car Thing for at least a year. At the same time that it died my 100-year-old German radio console shocked me as I plugged it in, leaving a char on my hand and severing the plug from the cord. And then my cat threw my record player on the ground and I haven’t had the heart (or the elastic belt) required to test it. My open ear headphones, too, are nowhere to be found. Basically my sound environment is shrinking at an unacceptably rapid pace. I’m going to have to start listening to the actual world around me, eavesdropping on bad first dates and learning bird calls and hearing the cars go by my open window. I’ve been checking CDs out of the library without knowing what they are, and scanning, scanning.

Song of the day: Honeycomb by Summer Underground

Drive of the day: SLC—>Park City—>SLC

Chore of the day: literally all of them

Hours of sleep of the day: 3

Product wish of the day: Lumos Duo Pen by Tom’s Studio (buy me a present) (honestly any present)

Color of the day: Pantone 17-4018 TCX (Windward Blue)

This is just a little guy (Zoombini-esque? I like the ones with springs or propellers for feet). I am working on collages, which are currently spread in a paper obstacle course across my entire living room floor, and getting ready for a new letterpress project, so if you want to follow along you can find me @ambiguous.objective on Instagram. Also, paid subscribers are about to start getting a biweekly online comic now soooooo think about it. Zine-tier rewards in the near future. Listen to something good today and say a little prayer for Car Thing, and scan your little heart through the radio while you’re driving.