47

C and I bought our first car together 2018, and in the lead-up starting noticing cars. She’d come home from somewhere and ask if I’d seen the new ____, or if I remembered the name of the new compact SUV by ____. We also started playing a game called “Rogue or Murano” where we’d try to distinguish them from each other over great distances. I won almost every time but then lost all credibility when I prompted her “Rogue or Murano!” in a particularly aggressive way and pointed to a CR-V. In my defense, her losing streak had made me really cocky. Maybe that is not a way to defend myself.

The vehicle-attunement didn’t abate even after we’d settled on a Rogue (or Murano?). It flared again in San Francisco in March, when I saw what I had initially described to myself as the future-sedan version of the Ghostbusters car. It hummed away from us as we made our way to our hotel, then showed up again behind us, then again beside us on a side street. I could not figure out how it was bending space-time in this way, and probably started in on a made-up quantum physics jag (this is a new favorite way for me to explain things to myself—and others, unfortunately—in the spiritual domain and also, it would seem, as pertains the behavior of cars). C told me it was one of many vehicles operated by Waymo, a driverless car service. A headless Uber. Sure enough: no driver to be found in any of the otherwise-occupied vehicles.

At almost the exact same moment I noticed the Waymo, we drove past a sidewalk that was covered in makeshift tents. Their tenants, presumably, moved around and through the encampment as our Uber rolled past, and a Waymo, and another Waymo after that. So: It is the case that you can call a Jaguar, without a human operator, from the computer in your pocket, to pick you up and drive you past a stretch of sidewalk where people live in a neighborhood made of garbage bags. I know there are contradictions, ironies, and instances of profound pain on this planet, but in my experience they don’t often collide in quite so grotesque a way.

It just happened again: Roll forward a month and I have decided to train for the Twin Cities Marathon this fall, after running it last October as well. This time I joined the Open Your Heart charity team. (The organization addresses hunger and housing insecurity in the twin cities.) In another particularly gross contrast between having and not-having: I circulated my fundraising page to a thread that my uncle created (and seems to re-create with a tweaked membership every couple days) in order to remind us of anniversaries, birthdays, and the mortification of various saints. Within 30 hours I had basically hit the $500 fundraising goal.

I imagine myself in the back seat of a driverless Jaguar, sending the text as I avert my eyes from the people living on the sidewalk as I pass them, and before it even hits the next block I have five hundred more dollars.

This is not a note that aims to solve this, of course, or to grandstand. At best it can turn me or us or someone, by some tiny degree, towards this unmitigated disaster that we have mostly decided to accept, or ignore, or re-frame out of basic, instinctive human empathy via hot takes on virtue. For what it’s worth, and for my 47th birthday, today, I am accepting candles on the cake in the form of whatever you might like to drop into this proverbial bucket:

https://raceroster.com/events/2025/93171/2025-medtronic-twin-cities-marathon-weekend/pledge/participant/36326053

To incentivize clicking the above link, last year I used some of my superfluous wealth to buy marathon photos, which meant I received seventy something pictures tied to my race number, and instead of the mile 6 one where I look like a middle-aged boss I chose the finish-line one where I look like I am about to fall backwards and break apart like all the bespoke pottery we can afford to drink coffee out of.

Thank you so much for considering this. I’m trying not to serve you a shame sandwich; all failures in that regard are my own misfires.

I remain,

A