Unscripted and recorded in one hour-long one-take alone within the confines of my car, the vocal track for the audio piece “How’s Your Car?” speaks to the concurrent COVID-19 pandemic and the January 6 threats to democracy in 2021. In this piece I reflect on my former vehicles (a beloved Saab and a later Audi) to which I held car identity but to which I also harbored co-dependency through their many breakdowns and contingencies. The cars become a metaphor for the emotionally unavailable romantic relationships I found myself in contemporaneously. Ones in which partners asked, “How’s your car?” in place of “How are you?”

“The thing that has happened from 2019, to 2020, to 2021, is that in order to become who we are, we have to learn to get out of toxic relationships. A relationship that keeps us sucked in and identifying with the thing itself, as if we are in partnership with it, as if we are both puppet and puppeteer together negotiating. We need to look at the objects around us possibly as props, in order to escape relationships that are hindering, because those that are hindering us are always based on some power differential. Whether it’s with a romantic partner who can’t tell you they love you until you’re gone. Or it’s the state of attempted totalitarian power, racial injustices, economic disparities. People keep saying, ‘I can’t believe it.’ But what can’t one believe about the state of democracy today? Unless they’re denying to themselves the toxic relationship that the current state has drawn us into.”

Multiple short audio clips occur in the latter half of the piece, which I recorded in advance as documentary material of my former vehicle. These discrete sounds—seatbelt buckle, windshield wiper, turn signal—become “things” that are shed in the reflection, and make the piece distinct from a form of performed monologue. In whole, the piece meditates on issues of repair within the neoliberal state of late capitalism. “How’s Your Car?” was supported by Stanford University’s Theater and Performance Studies Department.