Car Wash Neutral

After two months allowing Northern California fire ash debris and Interstate 80 highway dust coat my new(ish) car, I decided to take it to the local drive-through car wash.

On a Friday afternoon, the line was backed onto the street. For $10, you can choose the “Advanced” wash option for your car’s exterior (floor mat debris and seat crumbs be damned).

But there’s one caveat: you don’t actually drive through the car wash, you have to put your car in neutral gear and let the “flat belt conveyor system” guide you through to the other side, aka sparkling clean.

Sometimes in this life, you can actually purchase pristine renewal for ten bucks, along with the entertainment value of huge industrial brushes, tsunami-grade suds and hot air dryers that resemble the exhaust manifold of a fighter jet.

This got me thinking about neutral gear as a life approach, and of course the word, neutral. My inner word-nerd, poet’s Thesaurus equates neutral with “disengaged” and the Buddhist concept of “non-attachment.”

It also echoes something my therapist recently suggested that I try when meeting new friends: be more like a butterfly (low-key, bucolic, non-intrusive) and less like a hyper hummingbird. “You’re playing against type when you try to be like a high-velocity hummingbird,” she reminded me, “and people know it.”

According to Etymonline.com, the word “neutral” dates from the 1500s, from alchemy, where contrasting elements cancelled each other out. It also relates to politics and statecraft in the word “neutrality,” where countries and states stay on the sidelines in a fight. Think Switzerland.

And this right here speaks to my entitlement and sense of grievance. I literally get hot when I am wronged, and I’m spoiling to fight the person, or entity which has wronged me. I want to engage, and keep the car in Drive.

Most of the time, we back down, because the social cost (and the jail time) is high. We don’t succumb to road rage, or punching out a passive-aggressive, bully of a co-worker.

But that’s not really neutral gear. It’s more like idling, with a foot on the brake and a foot on the gas, ready to rumble. It’s a toxic state, believe me, and it’s no way to live. People around me know it, too. Like a boiling pot of soup, even with the lid on, something will explode, sooner or later.

Just like the car wash, if we want to become clean, we must place our cars in neutral, so the conveyor belt may carry us through to the other side.

(image: “At the Car Wash” by Or Hitch)