We drove back to the city from the Gingham Coast early Saturday morning, through 2024 traffic on 1950 infrastructure. Except for weaponry, amerika stopped investing in itself around that time, so nearly every road you drive on is too heavily trafficked, nearly every bridge is crumbling, and nearly everything you'd like to count on is un-count-on-able. Including amerika itself.
The drive is only one-hundred miles which should take about one-hundred minutes. Instead, because of the above, it takes about half-again as long, usually 150 minutes and when I finally arrive at the garage I park in, I feel like I've spent a week at the wrong end of a shooting gallery using live ammunition.
City driving, I am the Mario Andretti thereof, is different than country driving. The drivers are bad in Connecticut, where no one uses turn signals because things like courtesy and regard for those you share the road with are considered infringments on your own personal liberty. I've written in this space about the economic notion of "altruism." By definition it means doing something that helps others, not yourself. Using turn signals, not tailgating at 85 miles-per fit the bill. But for 99.7% of people on the road, such things are a bridge too far.
One of the few, visible technological advances in our modern world is EZ-Pass, the electronic toll collection systems used throughout many of the dis-united-states. I wonder if one unintended consequence of "invisible" systems like EZ-Pass is that, like traffic cameras instead of actual cops, they allow us to forget that there is government and authority present and doing their job. We don't see physical evidence of policing, so we therefore disregard it. We think it no longer exists.
I've written roughly the same thing about the disappearance in amerikan businesses if the physical paycheck. You used to get an envelope with a check or a paystub given to you. Sometimes along with a "thank you" and a handshake. When those small semiotic effects disappeared, a lot of humanity did, too.
I think, someday, some companies will realize that AI chatbots have the same pernicious result. They show people who need help that they're so unimportant that they don't deserve to have a person helping them, they'll get a dumb word-regurgitator. Their problem won't be solved, their time will be wasted, all in the name of efficiency. Efficiency, btw, is also efficiency in pissing off customers. But no one sees that.
Back to the city and the most benighted of all the world's roads, the always-under-construction Bruckner ironically, Expressway. To avoid the Triborough Bridge toll, which today is the equivalent of a mortgage payment, I shift to the right lane, to exit onto the Deegan. I get off in one exit and take the free Third Avenue bridge into the city.
A truck was stopped in the right lane, there was no shoulder, and with everyone going 80, it was hard to escape my Procrustean roadblock but I did, and while navigating the always-iffy Bronx, I noticed a change in my driving demeanor.
First, when you're driving in New York, everything is a misdemeanor. Da more you do it, de-meaner you get. The sine qua non of driving in the city is that the other guy is a homicidal maniac. If you don't out-maniac him, you're dead. Or worse, stuck behind a city bus or garbage truck.
The first thing I do when I enter the city's precincts, is move my left-hand, my steering wheel hand, onto the center of the steering wheel console. That's where the horn sits and if you're not driving with your horn, you're like Van Gogh painting without a brush. My right hand stays on my gear shift. I hope I'll live long enough to drive in the city out of second gear. But it hasn't happened as yet. Second gear in my 1966 Simca 1500 gets me to 35 mph, and that's good enough.
I horned through the city through congestion as backed up as Joey Chestnut's sphincter after the Coney Island hot dog-eating contest, but, magically, timed the lights without missing one on second avenue from 126th Street to 88th Street, where I turned east toward my parking garage.
The proper definition of a New York minute is the amount of time it takes after the light turns to green before you honk. My reflexes are better today than when I was playing professional ball and I have it down to the micro-second. To a life-long urbanite, this is a point of pride. In fact, if I could choose the copy for my as yet unwritten obituary it would read:
In a short while I dropped my wife and her 49 separate pieces of luggage in front of my building and circled up, around and over to my garage. I flashed my brights as I descended the ramp because someone is always trying to exit at 75 mph, the devil take the hindmost.
I made it, unleashed Sparkle, my golden retriever, and went on my way.
We had really good Chinese food for lunch.
There's no place like home.
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