Drive By

A playlist and a few words

Sometimes I like to start the day off slowly. We’ve reached the time of year when the sunrises give cotton candy colors, streaking across the sky as the clouds float away. Smoke stacks on industrial buildings climb high, some with steam, others with smoke, and the world begins working early. If you take the highway early, you know that the trucks start moving again at 6AM. They line the roads like sentries, people barely at rest, and always under siege.

The deepest dark that arrives before dawn hides the crumbling potholes, the kind that disintegrate the road on the edges, and leave wide chasms where smooth asphalt sat. It hides the treachery of poor craftsmanship. Deer traipse across spaces daintily, daring themselves to seek more in the ruins of earth.

Bakers have loaded the pastries into ovens, train stations bustle with bleary eyed passengers heading to work and school. The night shift switches with day as doctors and nurses swap seats and skulk through darkened parking lots. The highway moves, each mile and minute inviting more travelers as the world awakens and sets forth in motion. Trains fill with dreams of yesterdays and tomorrows as the hopeful and hopeless search for seats. The graffiti on the exit reads “Sleepwalking.”

Along the river runners chase another mile, rowers erg in tandem, and bikers coast along tree laden paths. These are the hallmarks of privilege, those in motion for a different purpose. As a new city looms in the distance, fragments of prosperity are strewn along the path. The roof is partly caved in on the second to last stop, and a homeless man has made the impossibly hard bench his regular place of respite.

The highway smells different at this point, full of sewage and rot, and the traffic slows and snags and snarls making the last five miles slower than the first fifty. Busses zoom by in their designated lanes, and traffic in tunnels, on train tracks and in the air converge, giving the appearance of liveliness. Lies are gilded into the veil of the mourning masses, dampening the bleakness.

Still, the music persists with an essential offering, nourishment for the soul in the form of hope. This is the morning commute.