I think cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals. I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.
Roland Barthes, The New Citroën, 1957
Rolling into the car wash, and Jim Croce’s on the stereo singing about working his fingers to the bone, and suddenly you’re eight years old again. When a car wash was fucking Disneyland? When those giant brushes descending on the windshield were like alien tentacles, an5d the soap foam was some kind of psychedelic storm, and the whole goddamn tunnel was this portal to another dimension where water came at you from every angle and made the world outside dissolve into color and chaos?
You’d sit there in the back seat, absolutely transfixed. The roar of the machinery. The way the light changed when you went under the dryers. That moment when the car lurched forward on the track and you weren’t driving anymore, you were just surrendering to the machinery, letting it take you where it wanted.
Barthes said cars are the Gothic cathedrals of our era. Maybe. But car washes? Car washes are pure theater. Pure spectacle. A four-minute show where your vehicle gets baptized and you get to sit inside this metal box watching water and soap and brushes perform their ritual dance.
Croce understood the blues of it, the working man’s relationship to the wash. But he maybe didn’t capture this part: that primal childhood thing that still flickers when you hear the first spray hit the hood. That sense of wonder at the simple magic of it. The way soap and water and industrial brushes can still, somehow, feel like witnessing something extraordinary.
Palo Alto Car Wash