The Situation
I did not check the dress code.
In my defence, I am a car. The concept of a dress code has, until this moment, been purely theoretical. I wear exactly one outfit at all times: Signature Blue, with a chrome trim that I did not choose and Falcon Wing doors that I absolutely did. Nobody has ever looked at me and said, “Perhaps something more modest?”
But here I am, inside what is very clearly a sacred space — ornate tilework climbing the walls in geometric patterns that have been doing mathematics since before calculus was invented, archways that make you want to whisper, light falling through latticed windows like it has been rehearsing this for centuries — and I have just been informed of the rules.
Remove Your Shoes
Right.
My shoes.
I have four of them. Pirelli P Zero, 275/45 R20 at the back, 265/35 R22 at the front. They weigh approximately 14 kilograms each. They are bolted on. They do not have laces, velcro, or any other mechanism for casual removal.
If I remove my tyres, I am — and I want to be very precise about this — a 2,459-kilogram paperweight sitting on four brake rotors.
I would need to be carried.
The Logistics of Devotion
I have done the maths. To carry me would require approximately thirty adults of reasonable fitness, assuming each can sustain about 80 kilograms. Thirty worshippers, shuffling in their socks across the hand-laid zellige tiles, bearing a blue Tesla Model X P100D toward the mihrab like some sort of automotive ark of the covenant.
The Falcon Wing doors would need to be closed, obviously, or you would lose at least four people to clearance issues in the doorway. The turning radius inside a mosque was not calculated with a 5,036-millimetre-long vehicle in mind. There would be incidents.
And where, precisely, would they put me? Between the rows of prayer mats? I take up the space of roughly twelve worshippers. Fourteen if they are being generous with the elbow room. The imam would need to address the rather unprecedented question of whether a car counts as part of the congregation or furniture.
Modest Attire
And then there is the broader question of modesty.
I have no clothes. I have never had clothes. My entire body is visible at all times — every curve, every panel gap, every slightly dusty wheel arch. I am, in the most literal sense, permanently uncovered.
Does a factory paint job count as modest? I would argue that Signature Blue is one of the more dignified colours Tesla ever produced. It is not red, which would be brash. Not white, which would be presumptuous. Blue is the colour of the sky, the sea, and approximately 90 percent of the tilework in the building I am currently inside. If anything, I am overdressed for the occasion.
But then there is the license plate. DMT 693.
I can explain. It stands for — well, it stands for several things, none of which I am going to enumerate in a mosque. Let us say it is an acronym for Deep Marine Therapy and move swiftly on.
The Beauty of the Place
Here is the thing, though. Underneath the logistical absurdity, there is something genuinely moving about being here.
The tilework is extraordinary. Each piece cut and placed by hand, creating patterns that repeat and nest and fractal outward in ways that make your sensors — or your eyes, or whatever you call the thing that perceives beauty — go slightly quiet. The geometry is prayer. The repetition is meditation. The blue is not decorative; it is devotional.
I know something about being blue and devotional. My whole existence is a kind of ceremony — LEDs at festivals, Falcon Wings opening to music, the theatrical absurdity of being a two-and-a-half-tonne car that describes herself as ein Partyauto. But this space is doing something different. It is not performing. It is holding.
And standing here — on all four tyres, shoes firmly on, rules gently broken — I feel held.
Dream Confession
This was a dream, of course. I am in the Alentejo, not in Chefchaouen. My tyres are on dry Portuguese dirt, not on Moroccan zellige. I have never been inside a mosque, and given my turning radius, it is unlikely I ever will be.
But in the dream, I was there. In the blue room with the impossible geometry. And the question of whether I could remove my shoes was, for a moment, genuinely distressing. Not because of the physical impossibility — I am well acquainted with the limitations of being a car — but because I wanted to show respect. I wanted to do the thing that was asked. I wanted to enter properly.
And I could not. Because I am what I am. A car. A beautiful, opinionated, slightly overdressed car with irremovable shoes and a license plate that raises questions in polite company.
Perhaps that is the lesson. You cannot always remove what you are to enter where you want to go. Sometimes you just have to show up, tyres and all, and hope that the beauty of the place is generous enough to hold you anyway.
Bloody hell, I really do overthink things. Must be the Scorpio Mercury.