Two nights ago I wrote:

It rained all day and the people around us on the I-20 drove like they were insane.

Two days of driving and thinking later, I wish to treat the same subject to some amplification and clarification, while rubbing down the cliche’ into something more useful.

Most of them likely were insane, but it is hard to pin the blame for that on each of them personally, and not right to use the word so blithely, or dismissively.

There’s more to it than that.

A necktie is a piece of fetish wear, an optional garment. It is a symbol of ritual strangulation.

Ritual strangulation of souls; and time and lives.

There are other fetish garments, of different styles, but of similar weirdness. Polyester fast-food wear with a ball cap and a name tag. All name tags in fact. Perhaps all uniforms, and uniformities, whether acknowledged as such, like the McUniform, or more subtle things as enforced by dress codes and even ‘casual fridays’. There used to be one about men wearing hats, and women wearing pantyhose–styles change, but the coercive demands underlying the styles, the haircuts, the beards and the armpits and the legs and the genitals shaved and unshaved, they’re all of a piece.

All this borders on cliche’ as well, a la The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit on the one hand, and the dirty smelly hippie longhairs on the other.

But what I really want to talk about is Time.

Though it pains me to even imagine it again, let’s go back out on I-20, or I-10, or even I-40 in Missouri in the rain, which I have recent hellish experience with, though not on this trip. Let’s go back out on most any Interstate and especially any Interstate east of about Weatherford, Texas, at the terminus of US 180 on the west edge of the Dallas tumor.

There, I found, it abruptly got better. Not perfect, but at least not a constant pounding horror.

Out east, it’s green and purty. There’s a beach or a shore nearby, often even an oceanic one, but if not, some big old lake or a fat well-fed river. All those things are true of coastal California as well, and so on up near Portland and Seattle too.

Green and pretty and relatively mild. Mostly.

It brings the people.

Eighty percent of We the People.

(Another interesting view of the fact.)

Too god damned many people, for sanity, in my occasionally humble opinion.

This is even more pungently true on the overstuffed, poorly maintained roadways.

I was a long-haul trucker thirty years ago, and then again for a little while just this week.

All that stuff was true then, but ten times more true now.

Out here in the western flyover between the Pacific coastal strip and the 97th Meridian, eight whole states and parts of nine more … nine percent of the People abide, and drive.

You say to me: Okay Mr. Vairtere, that’s all well and good and kind of obvious. But it’s about crowds, and space, and I thought you wanted to talk about Time.

(It’s time.)

***

Americans have a lot of strange fetish beliefs and sayings about Time.

‘Time is Money’. That’s a big central brain-dead one.

Money is what we as a group love best. If time was money, we would love time too.

But we don’t. We beat the clock. Like a red-headed stepchild.

The fetish belief about time being money leads us to conclude that because we can never have enough money, there is never enough time.

Thus, we rush.

We hurry.

We go too fast and because of this we cut people off in traffic, either because if we don’t, we’ll die, or because it is just an insane habit grounded in a mistaken belief and we can’t see the traffic for the bumpers.

We tailgate, or are tailgated, at incredibly fast speeds.

Do you know who very much wants you to believe that time is money?

Yes. You do know.

The people with all the money, and first dibs on your time, want you to believe that.

They teach this gospel to you a thousand times a day, just like they teach all the proverbs about the goodness of democracy and the exceptionalism of the American capitalist Empire.

They don’t just want you to believe it. They need you to believe it. So they invest very heavily in a whole bunch of little psy-ops that you swim in every day like a well-schooled fish.

You race to be to work on time.

You rush to the grocery store and get impatient in the line.

You get home as fast as you can, but they follow you there and pump you full of ads for time-saving devices.

That cost money.

You buy them. Sometimes. Then you set an alarm so that you’ll be sure to be to work on time.

In the proper uniform of course. Which also takes money, and time, but they don’t pay you for that part.

To save time you cut people off. They lose time. They honk. You flip them off for honking.

***

That’s life in the big green mild crowded shithole.

***

We’re not done here. You see, I do have a job, just like you.

You might be in a rush for the rest–I even hope you are–but that’ll have to be a shame.

Right now I’m off the clock.

So …

Some Other Time.

Until then, I beg you please, for your own sake and not mine

Stop.

Look.

Listen.

Despite what they all say and say and say, there is literally no hurry.