aquaplane v 1: rise up onto a thin film of water between the tires and road so that there is no more contact with the road
During a hurricane evacuation I had been awake for 30 hours and, in the back seat of the car, I don’t remember why but I noticed we were going the wrong way. It was true, not a lucid dream, we really were seeing thousands of cars lined up on the Interstate heading north while we had the soutbound side almost completely to ourselves. Our only company on that road were emergency vehicles and other cars moving at what was easily 90mph. As I lurched between being awake and asleep I saw those cars lift off. A police car roared past us, spraying water like a firehose, and I snapped awake when I saw that car rise up off the road. Why were we going the wrong way? Was someone sick? What was our personal emergency that sent us into the jaws of a dangerous hurricane while virtually everyone in the region got the hell out? I’ve never had an answer to that question, but I know that these evacuations were routine and my mother disregarded most of them. As a child I had dreams about my mother driving me into war, I helplessly in the back seat and gradually being made aware that we were nearing a combat zone as my mother dismissively drove on, cursing. I thought of these dreams in later years, when she became addicted to video games. I saw her techniques of game play as a reflection of her outlook on life. Instead of learning the subtleties of a game and its characters she would just plow through them, sacrificing whatever points or life she had to start the game. To her driving a car was a form of combat, in which there were winners and losers. Truckers always won and she bitterly allowed them to cut in front of her, remarking “Who do you think’s gonna win?” She similarly regarded certain villains and bad guys in video games as insufferable bastards who could not be defeated, but in that realm she was able to do what she could not do on the road. She showed her frustrations by just mowing through the bad guys and, by surviving, winning.
