Fighting Highway Hypnosis and the Economic War on Rest TPS-0020

Episode 20 originally published may 7 2022.

I just got back from a very epic trip to resupply some items and procure some new items crucial to the health of this ecosystem that I'm building out in a desert. In the next episode I’ll list all of the very important upgrades that are happening because of that trip.

There were a lot of observations that I was able to make. It's been over three months of abstaining from... call it a “road fast”. After a three month road fast I had a lot of inner turmoil, a lot of thoughts and feelings stirred leading up to getting back on the road and being on the road and then making it back from the road trip and thinking and feeling a lot about that experience in a new context.

I got my license later than many people, I was already 21 when I got my license. That’s a testament to how bike, bus and walk friendly my life in Portland and then Eugene, Oregon was.

I had to bum rides and whatnot, but I was a master of the bus system as a teenager and for the most part, at a certain point, my life was bikeable.

In the later percentage of my life in Portland, it was a bike, bus-able life, for sure. Then in Eugene, it was a hundred percent bikeable, and walkable.

Then moving to LA, at 22, it’s been almost 20 uninterrupted years of driving almost everyday, in traffic, many times in rush hours, both to and from whatever the wage slavery experience was that I had to do deal with. There was a lot of numbing out that had to be done, a lot of emotional armoring to endure that many hours.

I wonder how many hours that I've logged in that in that condition.

I would find ways to to, I would find ways to minimize that as much as possible, including things like living in the trunk of a small Honda while working at a corporate office job in a cubicle,showering at the gym and using the company lunch area fridge, the crisper box to store my perishables.

They knew my style. They let me get away with it.

They just said, don't tell the other employees that you're homeless and that you sleep in your trunk around the block, and that you stagger into work tucking in your shirt few minutes before your shift starts, and then you stay after hours to have your dinner.

I was doing the hard sacrificial life hacks in order to do my time in the workforce and then be adapted to minimalism, and urban survivalism so that I could eventually get out.

And now I'm free. Now I got out, and hopefully I’ll never go back.

I spent a lot of time driving, I spent a lot of time sleeping in my car on the side of the road and having to basically live a lot of Mad Max type scenarios within the modern world.

There were protocols that I would have to develop to be a vehicle dweller in all kinds of different environments.

And I figured out ways to stealthily car camp in very, very rich areas and stealthily car camp in very poor areas.

There's a lot of thinking and design strategy. I'm thankful to permaculture as a design system for helping me think through a lot of different variables and help me design and think about just multiple factors, multiple dimensions, the dimensions of time.

There's so much, if you are a certified permaculture designer or enthusiast who has not as yet achieved a design certificate...the application of the permaculture design system to any problem that you would ever need to solve.

It's an exquisite gift to have that training. If you have had the training, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

If you're curious or uninitiated completely into what permaculture is and what it has to offer as a design science, a way of learning design techniques and strategies.

I'm always gonna shout it out. And it is more freely available to study than ever before, given the resources online.

So back to getting into this discussion of what is really fresh in my mind, my heart, about car culture and my relationship to it, spanning my whole life, narrowing the focus on this last trip.

I rely on my the guerrilla, urban survival, vehicle dwelling skills that I honed over the course of many years, where I was basically, the word is a “rent resistor”. As a matter of fact to this day I have no residential...maybe there's one place and it was left in good standing but I pretty much have no residental rental history.

I've rented commercial spaces which seem to have a lighter touch...I have a clean criminal record a clean driving record but not a totally spotless credit record

At this point on paper, there's some places I could probably run for office, but not many.

Anyway, with rent prices so high, I figured out ways to rent closets, or trade services, like doing permaculture in someone's backyard for a room that month.

I became a master of the gift economy, the gray market, whatever you wanna call it, because the pain of working jobs, building someone else's empire for minimum wage, or not even much more...a lot of the time over the years it's soul crashing.

Everything feels ten or a hundred times heavier on my back and on my mind, and time moves a thousand times slower.

When you're working for somebody else to build their dream that they own, that they're gonna get the lion's share of the value out of, and you're basically expendable. And you could get fired if you show up late more than a couple times... in LA traffic, how much do you have to sacrifice to show up?

To wake up, to be severed violently from your beautiful R.E.M. state dream life by a horrific sound of an alarm clock, to have to abort the dream, sacrifice the time that is healthy to spend processing dreams when you wake up, to to really savor the good and bad of the dream.

And also kind of integrate it as if it was a shamanic ceremony of sorts...cleaving off of all of that value, of human existence so that you can stub your toe, burn yourself on the stove, burn your lips on the coffee or whatever, and just have this horrific circus act of a routine to get out the door and then put other people's lives at risk...including your own, by rushing to get to a place so that you don't have your entire life destroyed, and end up on Skid Row within two weeks of your Pink Slip.

I mean, that reality of wage slavery, I figured out how to live within walking distance of my job by sleeping in my trunk of a small car and I could barely roll over in there I had to be fetal all night, had to urinate in a one gallon jug and hope I didn't fall asleep with the cap open which has happened, and wake up covered in your own urine.

Sorry to do the T.M.I. thing, but it's been rough. Not to mention you're sucking exhaust, who knows if you're gonna wake up dead because someone smashed into you in the trunk.

But I think there was one time where a ghetto bird helicopter with infrared vision was flying over, and maybe they were looking for a fleeing suspect of a crime or something.

They spotlighted me as I was crawling in the trunk from the front seat and I noticed that there was a spotlight on me.

So I dove out of the trunk, back into the driver's seat and waited for a few minutes while they kind of swept me back and forth with this spotlight, nd I had to wonder, were they doing some kind of infrared scanning and they saw there was a body in a trunk, and then they kind of hovered for a minute. I imagine if that was the case in my paranoid mind, either it was totally a fluke and just total coincidence, or they're just doing their thing, and they're like, that's a body in a trunk that's alive we better investigate a bit. Thankfully they eventually went away without incident.

Back to car culture, we already know about how we can make car culture greener and safer for pedestrians, bicyclists, other drivers, etc. I don't have too much to add to that material.

But what I will add, how you could do more with less in terms of policy around making the road safer in regards to the phenomenon of highway hypnosis.

It's a fact of modern life in car culture that when they say, drowsy driving is drunk driving on the overpass hanging digital alert message boards that are out there.

When those aren't being occupied by an emergency message, they generally have a public PSA.

It's well known that drowsy driving is a cause of a lot of the accidents that tragically occur on the roads. There are a lot more drowsy drivers than there are drunk drivers.

By miracles, by guardian angels. There's no other explanation. The proof that guardian angels exist is the fact that I'm still alive and that a lot of people are still alive who drive out of financial necessity or romantic desires or evading some danger, whatever the cause of not having the...or not being facilitated to rest properly before operating a motor vehicle.

Those factors that get amplified and get magnified, the factors that result in accidents caused by drowsy driving and highway hypnosis some of them are so chaotic. You can't litigate or legislate everything. You can't create policies for everything. I'm a small government person. So I think out of the box in terms of regulating it.

I think it's very underestimated as a factor for the deaths on the highway. If one of the biggest silent wars that is going on is the casualties of the road…If you turn on a vehicle and you get on the road and you go more than 1 mile an hour, you’re an accident potentially.

Maybe a lot of people veer off the road, hit a telephone pole or a tree, and that's the end of them. I hope the tree heals, or they can put in a new...

But let's be real about the, the battlefield that the highway is.

I've heard a lot of accidents happen very close to the home. Lot of accidents happen backing out of a driveway. There's a lot to look into and study and research, you don't have to be an expert to glean just some of the headlines.

I subscribe to a global feed of disaster, natural and human made disasters from all over the world. This feed aggregates the very obscure but very significant patterns of failures of infrastructure, outbreaks of diseases, conflicts, security issues.

Every day, I would say a third, at least of the incidents that are reported, which obviously represent a minute fraction of total traffic accidents that occur, there's all kinds of heinous mass casualty accidents on roads all over the world.

I've been to places in the world where there are no stop signs, there are no signals, there's no red yellow, there's just total chaos.

I survived that, and I was totally distressed experiencing, that both in taxis and on buses... just honking a horn is what you do to speed through an intersection you don't slow down you don't come to a full stop.

You don't do a California stop and roll through the stop sign.

You just blaze through it, all horns blazing. You're going through that stop sign, and anybody who's there, for whatever reason is gonna get plowed down.

What goes on in countries with virtually no traffic regulations or no infrastructure to mitigate that kind of stuff.

Just looking at the my paradigm and and the paradigm of places in the world that are governed by traffic laws. I don't need to spend a lot of time trying to dig up horrific statistics about proving a thesis that the road is an unacknowledged, never ending battlefield with astronomical casualties that make year over year, cumulatively, probably all of the wars that have ever been fought look dwarfed (excluding some, some horrific exceptions, of course).

But who knows, maybe someone who's listening to this is a math genius, and may go, let me make a little formula and, and I will calculate the average global deaths and maimings of vehicular traffic and compare that to what's known on record about battlefield casualties.

And then we'll know which is the bigger war? Certainly there are less people dying of marijuana over-consumption than there are of people dying of all types of driving accidents.

So, yes, the discussion is framed, driving is dangerous. It is a dangerous battlefield, there are no friendlies, and there are no uniformed soldiers. Everybody, including yourself, is a combatant on that battlefield.

And despite all of the rules and penalties. In some ways, it gets worse during the, I will dare say, ongoing pandemic, or I should say, since the beginning of the pandemic, traffic statistics of casualties has in some places gotten worse because when the roads were opened up because of the lockdowns, people on those roads had less mitigation of their driving speed due to there being no congested traffic. Now they felt free to fly and go far above the speed limit.

You add into that mix of people speeding recklessly because they can...I couldn't believe it the few times that I have been on the road since the beginning the pandemic.

I could not believe how much more dangerous it was to be driving, given the fact that everyone who was on the road seemed to be driving so much faster.

Then you add to that, since the lockdowns ended and the roads are clogged again, even with probably in some places, record breaking gas prices.

It's dangerous now, because the extreme, call it the dissolution of the middle class, if you will.

The extreme income inequalities that the pandemic exacerbated creates more people with less to lose and more recklessness, more drug use, more intoxication to numb the pain of living in even worse conditions of poverty. So you have just again, more and more factors.

I'm not a transportation expert, but I know some transportation experts. I'm not saying anything that cannot be observed. Like a permaculture designer would just look at things to observe and sort of reverse engineer from what they see.

So given the problem set is that driving is like an insurgent guerrilla battlefield.

It's a fog of war that can make the whole experience the tragedy of friendly fire a normal conflict of sorts. It's a very treacherous dangerous situation and I remember I had a lover who was in a social psychology course where the professor started the beginning of the semester a with a rhetorical question that was something like this: would you find it to be morally upstanding, prudent, the legally sound as a citizen of a nation that is governed by rules, or a citizen of a city, county, state, whatever you wanna call the, the size of jurisdiction...

Would you allow a technology to exist that killed X number of people a year?

It was a well a crafted intellectual exercise to invoke people's sort of intuitive sense of the extreme wrongness, what we take for granted, as our traffic life.

If you were to frame the questions of whether or not that should be acceptable as it is, and you took away what we take for granted, which is that's just the world we live in….

You abandon the responsibility to redesign it, and just resign and say, what can I do about it? I gotta go to work and I'm late.

So then you hear the screeching sound of the wheels, and then you hear that smash, and then you hear the sirens, and then you're at the funeral.

She told me that she was profoundly moved by the experience of hearing that professor re-frame the question of whether traffic, as we know it should be allowed, should be tolerated.

And it was very clear to her when it was just a variable, like an X factor, of what the technology is that's so lethal, that's so prone to accident failure.

Not even getting into recalls and the design flaws of the manufacturers, but just the road and the rules of the road and the statistics of maimings and fatalities that occur, and everybody in the class not knowing what that X factor was, and it wasn't really alluded to...

I think it was very well crafted, so that you wouldn't even make the association until you were told.

And then the punchline gets revealed, and everyone is like, whoa, we're living in mass hypnosis.

We're living in this mass fantasy delusion that this should be okay.

And I don't know too much about the evolution of speed limits and whatnot but I know that the Industrial Revolution has a inertia towards efficiency, mechanical efficiency.

And most systems that are designed by engineers in that Industrial revolution paradigm are made to maximize the output...

I don't wanna get Marxian, get into theories of capitalism, but I will say one definition of capitalism being that humans themselves become the raw material and human labor is measured by capitalists as a resource, to be exploited and to be put to work in factories, adding value to the machine, the machining of production.

The system itself. and the dead material infrastructure of the system is actually what is being preserved.

What they're doing is they're preserving the roads and the lights. There's more energy and more money, more capital put into maintaining the status quo of the car culture, industries and public infrastructure, all that stuff.

That's what's being preserved. Human life is expendable so that the machine can perpetuate at a faster pace.

If they do figure out artificial intelligence for self driving vehicles, and they can prove that through artificial intelligence, we can reduce casualties by taking that factor of the human error of driving out of the equation...The next thing that we'll probably do within a nanosecond is push the limits of how fast you can make those driver-less vehicles go so transportation times could be cut in half, GDP could skyrocket and they will choose what number of deaths and casualties from that high speed, artificially intelligent self driving vehicle paradigm is the acceptable. An acceptable amount to prevent any outrage that would cause a real disruption of that status quo.

I've always thought, why are we driving in cars that aren't more like bumper cars, or cars that can roll?

Even on a bike once I am moving more than a fraction of a mile per hour...

I've survived skateboarding accidents that could have killed me. I learned the hard way why you need to wear a helmet on a skateboard.

Helmets have saved my life on bicycles, and I've been an avid cyclist in my life.

To me, putting my body in a machine that moves very fast, whether I'm controlling it or partially controlling it, or not controlling it at all...in a war zone of other vehicles. It's very disturbing.

Given what I know about cyber security now...the outcome of a hacked home surveillance device, like a door camera, or automatic or a voice activated lights, all of the Internet of Things devices.

You don't have to be a hacker, you don't have to go to Def Con to find out from the hacker community how poorly designed the security architecture is of most Internet of Things devices.

And so the idea of me stepping into a self driving vehicle, knowing that vehicle is not being driven by its own algorithm. It's being fed data from the Internet, feeding data back to the Internet. And the Internet itself is prone to being a vector of hacking, malicious hackers who could make a cottage industry out of driverless vehicles.

Just press a button and it spits out some code, that would, identify the vehicle target, give it GPS directions to take a long drive off a short pier.

It doesn't get safer because it gets to be higher tech. In fact, the attack surface increases and it gets more vulnerable.

All we can do is when we get on the road is drive as close to the speed limit as we feel comfortable for our own safety, safety of others compliance with the law, etc.

I have become far more conservative in my road safety protocols than ever before in my life. I continue to improve and enhance my road safety protocols.

I spend less time driving, because if you have to drive everyday, you're gonna start cutting corners on everything. That's a fact, I don't even need to go into detail explain that.

I'm not sitting on a high horse. I'm just saying fear is healthy. Fear is good if it is the fear that makes you act.

I'm very fearful about the state of the roads, and I'm more sensitized to it than ever now at this point in my life.

The fun part of exploring this unpleasantness is what I feel would be a multi-million dollar shark tank unicorn investable fortune 500 V.C. of the year if you've got the Silicon Valley connections.

The idea is an application that allows drivers to rent garage spaces from businesses and private citizens for short duration periods of time with no fancy amenities necessary. But there could be perks, bonuses, extra premium features.

But what I understand in my heart, knowing how difficult it is to get adequate rest in this paradigm of the road. You have to be a customer to use a restroom. In most places, parks have very limited hours of acceptable legal usage.

Parking on the side of the road and taking a nap can get you a ticket if not get you put in jail with your vehicle impounded.

I have studied the laws of vehicle dwelling I have been a law abiding vehicle dweller in the city and county of Los Angeles over the course of many years.

I've read the laws, I have read the articles, I have experienced the sweeps and crackdowns.

It's only getting worse. The places that I thought were the sweetest spots where I would car camp in the county and city of LA, now they're more congested than ever.

They're more dangerous than ever. There's more trash than ever.

If you are a driver and you've ever experienced highway hypnosis, where you start to hallucinate, because the lines that you're driving over, the dashed lines in front of you start acting like the hypnotist with the pendulum, or the watch, swinging it back and forth left and right.

You're getting very sleepy now. You're getting very suggestive now that to your brain, in that experience causes you to fall into a rut of some form of brainwave state, probably a theta brainwave state, where you aren't simply dozing off, you're actually, driving like dream, dream driving, falling asleep. At stoplight and waking up to the horn of someone behind you, praying, or realizing that there are guardian angels.

Obviously, if you're in a rush, you're trying to make good time on some destination, and you're gonna push yourself out of your wits and slam coffee and slam energy drinks and pills of whatever kind, hopefully not the really nasty pills.

But truck drivers are regulated to prevent them from driving more than the federally mandated number of hours they're allowed to drive in a day.

So that's a little more dialed in than the average citizen driving.



At least there are those little indentations, that so that if you veer off, they're gonna make a loud rumbling.

Those saved my life a few times. At least we have these driving security controls in place.

The missing piece to all of the very punitive and very restrictive controls is to accommodate people to be able to rest more.

What if you're late to work, but it's excused because you can prove that you were actually resting rather than putting yourself and others in danger on the road.

When I think about what short rentals has done, what the sharing economy has done...

I get the risks if you were to have short term motels that are basically designed for people to shoot up, turn tricks and do drug deals in, and you can rent a motel room for increments of 1 hour or less.

Those are obviously the shadiest places on Earth, and it's a miracle that they exist in some gray area of legality.

Obviously it's a honey pot for investigators and sting operators. Of course, they would get their quota in one day of just going door to door to sweep the whole place.

In an increasingly dangerous world for me, I don't like to leave vehicle out of my sight.

If you're a car camper and your life is in your vehicle, you really don't want to let your vehicle get out of your sight.

I don't live in my vehicle on the road the way I used to, but if I go out in the world, I've got a bug out bag, I've got food and water supplies, I've got medical supplies.

And that mobility platform is gonna allow me to conduct my civilian mission and operations and meet my objectives

While having at least two or more, if not four or more “what if” or “worst case scenarios” planned.

Never letting more than a half a tank of gas be used, having food and water...

There’s a whole vehicle preparedness, bug out vehicle discourse that is easy to find if you're curious about that.

But in this day and age, of all times to get a hotel room or motel room and then leave my vehicle to be attacked and stolen or stolen from…

What is an elegant solution? What if commercial properties, private citizens, residential properties, what if they were to accommodate drivers who were on road trips or commuting or whatever it is they're doing...

Of course, they're gonna sign terms of service agreements that say they would not be conducting any business or illegal activities for the duration of their time renting that space.

But if you didn't need your garage and you could put junk that you never use in storage, or you have a yard sale or give it away, or whatever...and you could invest a little bit in making a garage that has nothing to steal from it, and that really couldn't be damaged that much...

And you have some insurance the way they do with the sharing economy in general.

If you could tell me that I could pay less than a overnight charge at a hotel or motel at the lower end, and you can add value to me by making that opportunity safer than a sketchy drug infested crack motel where I could possibly put my vehicle at risk and go into a room with bed bugs and maybe hear screaming and gunshots and possibly get robbed.

You take those risk factors away and you give me a competitive price, and you allow me to do what is humanly necessary to do, which is to sleep adequately, and to take the first “nod-off” as the indication that I need to take the next exit ramp…

And I'm not going to ruin my stomach and my urinary tract and my nervous system and make my myself age twice as fast and have gray hairs at 20 with extra caffeine to stay on the road...

I'm going to say, no more caffeine, no more driving.

One nod and I'm pulling over and going on that app, and I'm gonna go pay someone to protect myself from the vector of the threat of being molested by the police or molested by pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers, etc.

Eliminating risk factors. And if I could just pay on an app, roll into somebody's barren garage, shut the door behind me accommodate my own waste management, if you will.

Sleep for a few hours, wake up, rested enough, have a little bit of flexibility.

It's very easy to program that stuff, like, one price for 2 hours, one price for 4 hours, one price for 8 hours, maximum time limit, etc.

What if a auto shop had an option to where you could pull in and rest and when the business opens in the morning, they're gonna offer to do the diagnosis that you might need if let’s say, you're overheating, and you can barely make it anywhere.

You get to a place where you can rest, you can pause.

I watched a documentary about truck drivers, an AI documentary, and they showed a truck driver who was gifted the freedom to sleep in his truck while a shop did repairs.

He's a trucker, he's a thousand miles from his home, and he's trying to save money, and he's living on a shoe string budget because of deregulation and de-unionization.

I feel for the truckers. I am in solidarity with the truckers, because I have learned that they live in this legal gray area where, if they park somewhere and sleep, they're not gonna get a ticket for vehicle dwelling, they're not gonna get messed with as long as they're not using their air horns or air breaks in a residential zone, they kind of are allowed to live in this gray area.

I discovered that I could more safely vehicle dwell by sleeping where they sleep and parking where they park.

It was better safety and I'm definitely alive because of them, and because of that, discovering that, because my life was threatened, living in vehicles on Skid Row by ex cons out there trying to rob me, so there's a lot of a thought and emotion that goes into this.

If I only could have, over all those years, and if I could only for the rest of my driving life, have an option to pull over, go on an app, and anywhere in the country or the world, be able to book a place to rent for a few hours to sleep.

I looked at the laws last time because I have no excuse not to do the contingency planning. I think differently every time I do anything, go anywhere.

From what I’ve learned from elite Global War On Terror operators, all of the thinking, all the security factors rotating the watching, having navigators...

We don't know what we're missing as civilians who do not have teams around our missions.

If the mission is to survive traffic, to get to work and back, maybe you could pay somebody to sit there and watch you to make sure you're not nodding off.

Maybe you can afford to employ that person for that job so that you can survive. A military tactical thinker would think about those contingencies, things like that.

What happens if your vehicle breaks down?



I’ve thought of so many things now, I added so many factors to those “what ifs”.

Of all of these things, from how much water to take, how many bills to pay in advance, what the map of the rest stops are, what the local shops are, calling my insurance companies, figuring out what exactly the fine print of their policies is.

Making sure I'm in compliance.

This is stuff I never would have done before being influenced by these ex military folks.

But these are all things that they were sitting in team rooms discussing with white boards.

They were war gaming and table topping, everything that could possibly go wrong from Point A to the objective and back. That was their job,now, but it's not for most people. It's not our job. We don't get paid to think about how we're gonna be survivable.

We cut corners on survivability, and we put ourselves and others at great risk, and we justify it.

We numb out.

We don't do things like sit in a team room and really plan out the risk factors and what we will do in response and that's a real tragedy.

So for me, that one factor, the thing is, I realized, wait a minute, the title to my vehicle...there’s reasons why not to leave it in the glove compartment, some people just do it because they put all of their vehicle documents in one place. I've done it before without thinking, just out of convenience. Oh, that's where car stuff goes. There's reasons why that's not a good idea to put it there.

It's always replaceable but there have been times where I couldn't find the title. I didn't know where I put it. I put it in some storage unit or put it in some house or whatever.

So that core piece of intelligence, the knowledge of the whereabouts and the accessibility of the vehicle title, I realize that is a big deal, because if you were on a road trip and you break down. Or you get hit and your vehicle is totalled, or you total your vehicle and you want to junk it at that moment, if you don't have that document, not just in your vehicle, but in your pocket if you survived and escaped an accident.

Will you be conscious or unconscious? I have been pulled out of a overturned vehicle on the side of the highway, unconscious by first responders, and I woke up with only what I had in my pockets.

Most of what was in the vehicle was strewn across a mile stretch leading up to where the accident occurred, which was the result of a back wheel, a back tire, a used back tire. It was a used tire that I bought and I'm not saying it's because it was used, but it just happened to be a used tire.

It blew out. I was driving the speed limit and before I knew it, it felt like the force of God had come down with a steel toed boot and kicked the back of my car so that I spun, I don't know how many times, and I was fully awake, fully conscious.

There were no other vehicles, thankfully involved in the wreck.

But I felt this un-imaginable force just pushing me into the next lane. Unbeknownst to me, what had happened was the driver's side rear tire blew out and at that speed, there was no way to counteract that force of being spun like a top.

My understanding is that after spinning however many times, the car smashed against the right side of the road, into what would have just been a rock face and then did whatever it did from that impact to where I ended up upside down with two or more of the wheels folded completely right angle under the vehicle.

The roof and windshield were almost flattened, windows were broken, safety glass everywhere.

I knew that sliding took place for quite a while, because when I went to go recover the vehicle, after I got out of the hospital, days later, I borrowed a vehicle of a friend.

I drove back out to that area of highway and first I saw a box of food I had...then later was my tape collection. Then all those are my tools, these artifacts along the road.

I must be getting close to where it happened. I went and I gathered up what I could that was thrown from the vehicle.

Vehicle was impounded. I've got pictures of it. Probably the impact that made me unconscious was actually the roof of the vehicle crushed in upside down on top of my head.

I had a small neck injury from it, though it could have killed me. It should have killed me. I should have been paralyzed or debilitated from it.

Miraculously, I came out with no scratches, barely a bruise, just enough neck pain that I couldn't lift my head for a week.

Luckily there was no permanent damage done. At a certain point of speed, I'd say anything past 65 mile an hour, whatever speed it is and it depends on the weight of the vehicle, that's something you have to adjust to if you have a new vehicle.

There's a lot of variables, but certainly there is some formula. I just never knew that was even possible.

Like no one told me, if you blow out a tire at high speed, you're gonna spin like a tops, hit the side of the road, wake up upside down, being pulled out by first responders.

I'd be like, damn well, I think I'll just drive a little bit slower, because I would like to drive at the speed where, if I start swerving or something weird happens, then I can just correct it, slow down and pull over. That was completely out of my control and completely not my negligence, other than driving on a used tire.

That’s the only thing I could attribute it to, that doesn't mean that new tires won't blow out or be improperly installed, etc.

You get scared straight after certain things.

I don't like being an aggressive driver. Passing people results in you to driving, 80 plus miles an hour sometimes and it could be the safest thing to do for you to pass, like passing these giant trucks that are halfway in your lane, it's very treacherous.

But I would say, after all of the planning I did, what am I gonna do if this happens?

Am I gonna have a designated or list of repair shops to get work done? What am I Where am I gonna sleep if I have to get work done? Am I gonna pay to get myself taken back? What's the point of no return? All these things I figure out and I work through now.

The thing that didn't appear to me obvious at first, but it came as sort of emergent property of going through that thinking, was like, wait a minute, where the is the title?

If you don't have that title, not just in your glove box, but actually on your person, if you get an accident, you lose consciousness...

I even think about what happens if they have to cut your clothes off because they're operating on you in an accident, you better hope that the contents of your pockets don't get stolen, or that those clothes don’t become part of the wreckage.

I would say having a necklace with a waterproof match container with your critical information, that should be given.

As long as my neck wasn't injured or swelling, I should have that around my neck.

From a permaculture perspective, people care is one of the three ethics, and I think a lot more people care could go into a permaculture designed car culture where it's not just the cyclists versus the motorists or the pedestrians versus the cyclists and the motorists, or the gas and diesel versus the electric or the hybrid.

The bigger factors are excessive driving speeds no matter how awake you are, and the need to be well rested to avoid highway hypnosis at all speeds.

I would prefer to never drive again if I could.

I'm almost there.

The one Achilles heel of vehicular travel, short and long distance, again, because obviously long distance driving, if you're driving across the country, you can probably figure out how to get yourself to the rest stops if you don't wanna park somewhere in a hotel or motel to rest.

It's more situations like where there's an accident, traffic is backed up for miles, a two hour commute that actually should be a 20 minute commute with no traffic.

It's 2 hours in rush hour, and it's 4 hours in rush hour with one accident, and you run out of gas, or you had a long day at the office and you're drowsy, nodding off, and getting highway hypnosis...

To just pull over anywhere and find a way to be able to get some rest without risking being molested by criminals or law enforcement.

Please help help us, those who have learned the hard way and fear greatly, the unthinkable horror of being injured or killed in an automobile accident, and worse than ever, the compounding horror and hellish karma of ever causing harm to anyone else.

The more I value life, the more I care about staying out of trouble, being legally compliant and taking it a step further, going the extra mile to add layers of safety and security to my lifestyle so that I don't jeopardize the life that I value.

And I certainly do not put other people's life at risk. And have that be and evolving an ongoing project.