Crazy on Board

My commute is quite different from foreverever’s. I am one among the legion of half awake car commuters who choke the southland with heat, smoke, and anxiety. My drive spans 25 miles from my comfortable urban center to the end of civilization, where salad bars are banned, and dogs with 8 saggy tits rule the land. Aunty Entity played by Tina Turner in chaps runs this place.

My challenge in the morning is not so much staying alive while in a zen space, rather getting there on time, in one piece, without killing anyone. I drive like I ride my bike. Darty, aggressive, stealthy. As a working stiff, I’m not making art because I’m too tired, so I fill the boredom by recreating my last game of Crazy Taxi on the 405.

I have to actively choose to be passed by other cars. I love to hear the sound of my engine pegged somewhere around 3800 rpm, which translates to about 90 mph. Sometimes, I imagine that I am driving so fast that my car and I disintegrate sublimely into the ether. I drive in the left lane with my windows down so I can hear the sound of the wheels, the exhaust overrun, the sound of the heavy breathing typewriter stuffed behind me, all reflecting against the retaining wall.

Driving ultimately is a bad idea. It is ego expressed in its filthiest form. Mass transit riders know the art of graceful surrender. They surrender to the train, the bus, the throng, weather, labor unions, angry train operators and bus drivers, stinky passengers, and they shrink their footprint to only that piece of mobile real estate imprinted by their butts and/or their feet. They are the serenity prayer in motion.

Drivers are the diametric opposite. We exist under an Astrodome of false notions. We believe that we can influence our arrival time. We believe in short cuts, secret passages. We rely on painted lines to keep us from harm. Our extremities are constantly engaging some control device, eyes scanning ahead and behind, mind tapping its fingers, calculating and recalculating. Our footprint is defined by speed, sight lines, and reaction time, and could easily measure up to 400 square feet. A driver cares only about piercing the space-time continuum. Any break in the logjam is our opportunity to blast off to the next bottleneck. That’s why we speed to the red light. We think we can touch the hand of god in between lights.

Commuting is inherently miserable. No iPod can eliminate it, they can only mask it with your own creative play list, and even still, you can hear its rumble beneath “Under Pressure”. And since I don’t have adequate chaps and feathers, I need to frame my daily race to and from Thunderdome in some way that makes it as fun and as thrilling as being chased by the citizens of Bartertown.

My apologies to everyone in my wake.