Where am I going?
Nowhere. I am going nowhere, stuck here in my own specific
superstructure of time, space, history, energy, and culture. Sitting here in
traffic, watching the other side of the highway; watching cars chase each other
in that psychosexual Freudian-accordion dance of mechanized war. Where are they
going? Somewhere. Somewhere other than here.
What time is it. It’s not a question. It’s a feeling I get
while sitting on the exit ramp; a state of mind I enter while staring at the
pink sun-eating clouds on the horizon, watching as a white Suburban flies in
front of me, watching him, her, whoever
move up one car length and advance a millisecond in the space-time continuum of
rush-hour exit-ramp pole-position, watching the oblivious gaze of the driver
who I see now is a fat man in a
football jersey, a man who has just maneuvered into twenty-seventh (instead of twenty-eighth)
place in line at a red light: that perfect analogue for the end of one’s life.
Do you see it? Let’s pack it in folks, sit impatiently, inch forward ever so
slightly, and sigh in that especially touristy way over the performances of
artifice you only hear on drive-time radio.
The light turns green and you realize that a third of your
life is gone,
(if you’re lucky).
Must have been a really long light.
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