The car, a white BMW 850i, wasnβt mine. The alcohol in my blood wasnβt mine either. Well, I didnβt pay for the alcohol. The fact that someone else bought the two bottles of Pinotage I drank was all I needed to convince myself that my space-twisting buzz wasnβt mine either, and therefore driving Tinusβs car all the way to Graskop wasnβt a big deal.
The playlist wasnβt mine as well. A bunch of hippie-dippy songs from the 1960s. Tinusβs attempt to convince himself that he was cool once. Maybe BMWβs in-car entertainment system is designed for people so old that a 23-year-old like me stood no chance of figuring out how to change the music. Maybe it was my borrowed alcohol.
Ten kilometers north of Graskop a song I actually liked finally came up in the rotation β the gentlemen of the band Steppenwolf urged me to come with them on a Magic Carpet Ride.
That moment - the point at the beginning of the song where the trippy sound effects end and the singing comes in - was perfect. In those few seconds, everything was right. The entire universe was working for me. I thought of the tens of thousands of hours of engineering work it took to make the 850i β all of those experts in manufacturing and engineering working to build this car, just for me. The section of R532 I was on had been repaved last week. The macadam was a flawless black ribbon laid delicately over the hills overlooking the lowveld. Fifty workers struggled in the summer sun every day for weeks, just to lay this asphalt for me to drive on. I could almost feel every inch of the infrastructure to put petrol in my tank, from the pump at the Engen, all the way back to the sand in Saudi. All of those wells and ships and pipes and refineries and fuel trucks existed simply to put gas in the tank of this car. The entire world had been working for decades just to build this perfect afternoon drive. How could I let them all down? Suddenly, this section of R532 seemed like a great place to see what the BMW engineering team had in mind, performance-wise, when they designed the 850i.
I accelerated to 160 kph and everything was still solid. Any place that car went on the road was right β I flew to the opposite lane to pass a slower car, then switched back to the left lane instantaneously - like a bad special effect in a B movie.
Let the sound take you awayβ¦
I turned the volume up and squashed the gas pedal into the floor.
The road made a tight turn β no biggie for the 8-series, no need to slow down.
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