Tonight the full moon hangs over the eastern hills like a distant sentinel, or like the enormous flashlight of a kid who has turned over an immense rock to look at the ants scurrying purposefully around underneath. The ants in this image are cars. The time is 8:45 pm, and I number myself amongst the ants. I look at my fellow ants with suspicion. Where are they all going? Does the guy merging to my right see me? How many of these people would I get along with if I got to know them? How many of them are evil? Every once in awhile, when a car passes, I shiver. This has happened for years, and I can't explain it. Maybe I'm picking up some sort of negative energy from the drivers. I'll never know for sure. I don't know the stories behind these people. I try to always remember that they are people, and not just a collection of potentially lethal objects hurtling through the moonlight around me. Automobiles can be dehumanizing and alienating. They shut us off from the world. The proverbial flowers on our journeys don't get smelled. Maybe this is why there is road rage. Maybe this is why I see other drivers do increasingly outrageous things as the years pass. We saw a guy take a left turn out of a parking lot the other day, and drive about half a block on the wrong side of the road, just because he didn't want to wait for traffic to clear enough for him to reach the correct side of the road. What an arrogant little man!
My car does get me to work though. It also gets me through work, and back home again. I've driven roughly 170,000 miles in it since I bought it in 1997, and I worry that some day soon it will expire. I'm not sure it will even make it to my last car payment. We'll see. Tonight I ponder these things.
I also think about Sophie, and how she cries when I leave for work. It makes me want to work at home. ...and then I wouldn't really need a car.

cds I listened to while avoiding the other cars: Fabio Frizzi "Zombi 2/Un Gatto Nel Cervello" soundtracks, Stefano Mainetti "Zombi 3" soundtrack, Discharge "Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing", Cowboy Junkies "The Caution Horses", Shock Headed Peters "Several Headed Enemy", and Buffy Sainte-Marie "Coincidence and Likely Stories"

currently enjoying the mind expanding sounds of Nurse With Wound "Soliloquy for Lilith"