Warm Leatherette

Car accident in Phoenix, Arizona

It seems our neighborhood is becoming more attractive to people desiring a moment taken from the pages of Crash. Between a shooting of a police officer last week and a couple of traffic-stopping major accidents near our intersection, my confirmation bias is triggering a false sense of things going to shit around me. Of course, I don’t believe that for a second but how else should I try to milk some drama out of these events that are simply a normal part of life? Due to my title reference, I had to look up that old song that was part of my high school years back when Daniel Miller of Mute records fame released the song of that name by his group, The Normal, based on J.G. Ballard’s book. Well, I thought everyone knew that song and then I read that only 30,000 copies had been sold following its release, I’d imagine that back then that not many people had read Crash either. Anyway, I don’t mean to imply that the person in this car accident started masturbating in their cave of airbags hiding some peculiar sexual proclivities or that the paramedics who took the person away started in on a session of fornication en route to the hospital, it’s just that since I was 14 or 15 I’ve never been able to see an accident in the same way and keep Warm Leatherette out of my head. Life would probably have been a lot more normal had I listened to more Led Zeppelin and stuck with reading Stephen King.

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